What is Paid Search in Google Analytics?

Seeing "Paid Search" in your Google Analytics reports is your first clue to understanding which of your paid advertising efforts are actually working. This article will show you exactly where to find your paid search data in Google Analytics 4, what key metrics to watch, and how to use this information to make smarter decisions about your ad budget.

What Exactly is Paid Search?

Before we jump into Google Analytics, let's quickly define "Paid Search." Paid Search refers to any website traffic that comes from someone clicking on an advertisement you've placed on a search engine results page (SERP). The most common platform for this is Google Ads, but it also includes ads on Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines.

You might also hear it called:

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC): This describes the model where you, the advertiser, pay a fee each time one of your ads is clicked.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): This is a broader term that encompasses PPC but can also include SEO (search engine optimization). However, in many contexts, SEM is used to refer specifically to paid search activities.

The goal is simple: you bid on specific keywords your potential customers are searching for. When they search that term, your ad appears at the top of the results, and if they click it, they land on your website and you pay a small fee. In Google Analytics, all of this traffic is bundled together and categorized under the "Paid Search" channel.

Why It's Critical to Analyze Paid Search in Google Analytics

Your Google Ads account is great for understanding ad-specific metrics like click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), and impressions. But it offers an incomplete picture of what happens after the click. That's where Google Analytics comes in.

By analyzing your paid search data in GA4, you can answer critical business questions that your ad platform alone can't:

• What do users do after they click? Do they bounce immediately? Do they visit multiple pages? Do they add items to their cart? GA4 tracks the entire user journey on your site, not just the initial click.
• Which campaigns are actually driving sales? A campaign might have a fantastic CTR in Google Ads, but if none of those users convert into customers, is it really successful? GA4 connects ad clicks directly to revenue and conversions.
• How does Paid Search compare to other channels? You can see how paid traffic performs against Organic Search, Social Media, or Email Marketing. This helps you understand its role in your overall marketing mix and allocate your budget more effectively.
• What is the long-term value? GA4 can help you see if users who first found you through a paid ad return later through another channel to make a purchase.

Without GA4, you're flying blind, making budget decisions based only on clicks and impressions instead of actual user behavior and business outcomes.

How to Find Your Paid Search Data in GA4

Accessing an overview of your paid search traffic is straightforward in GA4. The main report you'll use is the Traffic acquisition report.

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics 4 property.
2. From the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports.
3. Under the Life cycle collection, expand the Acquisition section and click on Traffic acquisition.

This report shows you where your website visitors, which GA4 calls "sessions," are coming from. By default, it groups them by the Session default channel group. You will see a table with rows like Organic Search, Direct, Referral, and, of course, Paid Search.

From here, you can isolate your paid traffic. To filter the report to show only Paid Search data, click the "Add filter +" button at the top of the report. Configure the filter like this:

• Dimension: Session default channel group
• Match Type: exactly matches
• Value: Paid Search

Click "Apply," and the entire report will now be focused solely on performance data for visitors who arrived via a paid search ad.

Key Metrics to Analyze for Paid Search

Once you're looking at your Paid Search data, you’ll see a table filled with different metrics. While all of them are useful, a few are absolutely vital for understanding your campaign performance.

• Users: This tells you the number of distinct, unique individuals who visited your site from a paid search ad. It's a key measure of your overall reach.
• Sessions: A session is a period of time a user is actively engaged with your website. If one "User" visits your site three separate times from an ad, it will count as one user and three sessions. This metric helps you understand traffic volume.
• Engaged sessions & Engagement rate: An "engaged session" is a visit that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews. The engagement rate is the percentage of total sessions that were engaged sessions. This is GA4's improved version of "Bounce Rate" and tells you if your ad landing pages are relevant and captivating. A low engagement rate might mean your ad copy creates expectations your page doesn't fulfill.
• Conversions: This is arguably the most important metric. A conversion is a key action you want users to take, such as a purchase, a form submission (generate_lead), or signing up for a newsletter. Tracking conversions tells you if your ads are driving meaningful business outcomes.
• Total revenue: For e-commerce sites, this is an essential KPI. It shows the direct revenue generated from sessions that originated from your paid search campaigns, letting you calculate your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Drilling Down: Analyzing Specific Campaigns and Keywords

Seeing your overall paid search performance is great, but the real insights come from digging deeper. By adding a secondary dimension to your reports, you can break down the data to see exactly which campaigns, ad groups, or keywords are your top performers.

From the Traffic acquisition report, click the small blue "+" icon next to the primary dimension (Session default channel group). A list of other dimensions will appear. For paid search analysis, the most useful ones are:

• Acquisition > Session campaign: This will show you the performance of each individual Google Ads campaign.
• Acquisition > Session source / medium: This shows you the source (e.g., 'google') and medium (e.g., 'cpc'), confirming your tracking.
• Traffic Source > Session keyword: This reveals the specific search terms people clicked on to trigger your ad and land on your website.

Example Scenario: You're running a campaign called "Summer Sale 2024." To see if it's working, you would go to the Traffic acquisition report, filter for Paid Search, and then add "Session campaign" as a secondary dimension. You can then find the "Summer Sale 2024" campaign row in the table and see its specific users, engaged sessions, conversions, and revenue. You can even sort the table by the "Conversions" column to immediately see which campaign is driving the most results.

Common Problems and How to Fix Them

Sometimes your paid search data doesn't look right. Here are a couple of the most common issues and how to solve them.

Problem: My Google Ads Data Isn't Showing Up in GA4

This is the most frequent issue, and it's almost always because your Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 accounts aren't linked correctly.

The Fix: Linking the two platforms is essential. It enables a seamless flow of data between them and automatically enables "auto-tagging," which is a feature that adds a unique gclid (Google Click Identifier) parameter to your URLs. This is how GA4 precisely identifies traffic from Google Ads.

To link your accounts:

1. In GA4, go to Admin (the gear icon at the bottom left).
2. In the Property column, scroll down to Product Links and click on Google Ads Links.
3. From there, click the blue Link button and follow the prompts to choose your Google Ads account.

Once linked, it can take up to 48 hours for data to start populating, so be patient!

Problem: My Reports Show "(not set)" for Campaigns or Keywords

Seeing "(not set)" means GA4 knows the traffic came from paid search but is missing the specific detail (like the campaign name or keyword). This is very often another symptom of the Google Ads account not being linked or auto-tagging being turned off.

The Fix: First, ensure your accounts are linked (see above). Second, check that auto-tagging is enabled in your Google Ads account setting. While you can manually tag your URLs with UTM parameters, auto-tagging for Google Ads-to-GA4 traffic is highly recommended as it's more accurate and pulls in richer data, like keyword details and ad group information, that you can't get with manual UTMs alone.

Final Thoughts

Understanding your Paid Search performance inside Google Analytics 4 is a non-negotiable skill for any modern marketer. It transforms vague ad metrics like clicks into tangible business outcomes like user engagement and revenue, allowing you to confidently manage your ad spend and prove the value of your campaigns.

While GA4 is powerful, we know that building these reports, digging for insights, and connecting all your platforms can feel like a full-time job. That's why we built Graphed. We connect directly to your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts in just a few clicks, pulling all your data into one place. From there, you can just ask questions in plain English, like "Show me my top performing campaigns by revenue this month" or "Compare engagement rate between paid and organic search," and instantly get the charts and dashboards you need. It gives you all the insights without the steep learning curve.