how to Connect your Analytics and AdWords accounts

The key to a successful advertising campaign is to properly understand the people you’re targeting.

Traditionally advertising agencies used personas to build a profile of a typical consumer within the broader market segment they were appealing to. This enabled the copywriters and artists to tailor their work to appeal to these avatars, in the knowledge that they represented the market

segment as a whole. These days the same general approach is still used, but instead of purely working with hypothesis ahead of your advert, you can now also get near real-time analysis of your actual customers and how potential ones are interacting with your advertising. This allows you to make changes in response to these usage patterns, with the aim of increasing your conversion, sign-up or sales rates. Helpfully, Google’s AdWords and Analytics services can be linked to give you a better picture of how visitors, who arrive at your website via your adverts, are behaving. By analysing patterns and tweaking your content, you can maximise your return on investment while improving the customer experience. Here we will show you how to get started.

1. Sign in: Visit and log into your AdWords account as if you were planning to launchan AdWords campaign. Once you’re signed in, you’ll arrive at the standard AdWords dashboard view. 
2. Select Analytics: Using the menu that appears along the top of the Google AdWords dashboard, choose the ‘Tools and Analysis’ tab by clicking on it, then select Google Analytics from the menu that drops down. 
3. Administrate it: From the resulting screen, which shows details of your accounts, click on the Admin button at the top-right corner of the page. This will take you to the administration options for your account
4. Locate the account: In the accounts list, click on the name of the account you’d like to link to AdWords, then click on AdWords linking, and finally the +New Link button. Now you’ll need to confirm the AdWords account. 
5. Choose AdWords: You can have multiple AdWords accounts, so you’ll need to confirm the AdWords account you’d like to link to. Simply select the account you’d like to use, then click on the Next Step button. 
6. Choose the views: Under Link Configuration, choose the Analytics views you’d like to share the AdWords data with. Any specific views in Analytics where you’d like AdWords data to appear should be added now. 
7. Complete the link: Click Link Accounts to confirm the link and allow your two accounts – AdWords and Analytics – to exchange data. You may have to wait up to 24 hours before you can see the data appearing. 
8. Unlink accounts: If you’d like to remove the link between AdWords and Analytics at any time, repeat the steps until you reach the page that lists accounts. On this screen, choose Unlink from the AdWords Linking section. 
9. Remove from views: To remove AdWords data from a particular view, you don’t need to unlink accounts. Instead, follow the steps as before, but deselect the views in the ‘Usage in Analytics’ column.