We recently attempted to link our Google Analytics with our new Google Adwords account, but just couldn’t seem to get it work. After a bit of research, it appeared we weren’t the only ones having the issue! See here.

When I searched on Google, and selected the first Google property about linking Adwords & Analytics the instructions provided simply did not work. I researched further and found the thread above were other people were reporting the same issues as me.

NOTE: The original Google article was http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1704341?hl=en – however it now seems Google has corrected the issue and put the correct video up on the site.

The Error:
When attempting to link, these are the errors I’d receive:

“None of your profiles are available for linking due to your account settings.”

And when using the tree structure to view all the accounts, all would have the error message next to them:

“Not Available”

The Solution:
Eventually I stumbled across a page which had different instructions on linking Google Analytics & Adwords together, this page seemed to work after following the steps: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033961

Here is a shorted version of the steps here:

1. In Google Analytics go to Admin -> Users and make sure the email address associated with your Google Adwords account is setup as an admin. If not, add the user in.
2. In Google Adwords go to Tools and Analysis -> Google Analytics
3. Select the Admin tab on the top right hand side of the page.
4. Click the Google Analytics account you want to link with Google Adwords.
5. Select the data sources tab and then select the Adwords tab.
6. Select Link Accounts.
7. From the list select the accounts you want to link with Google Adwords.
8. If you want to have data automatically tagged from Adwords (this means all your campaign data, etc will be automatically setup in Google Analytics, if you select the manually tagging option you will need to manually tag your campaigns).

You should now have your accounts successfully links, you can check it’s all working by going to Traffic Sources -> Advertising -> Adwords -> Campaigns in Google Analytics. Start watching for data here, and if you start to see traffic through your campaigns it means the linking has worked!

What can you do with the Adwords/Analytics Linking

After all that, what can you actually do with Google Analytics/Adwords linking?

Taking a look in on the Google Analytics page under Reporting -> Traffic Sources -> Advertising -> Adwords you can see a few options which include:

Campaigns:
Clicking on this link will show the traffic and stats by campaign. You can further break this down to Ad Group by clicking again, and then by clicking on the Ad Group you will get a break down by keyword.

Keywords:
This section will give you a breakdown of traffic and stats by keyword, clicking on the keyword will show the campaigns the keyword is appearing in.

Matched Search Queries:
This section shows you the traffic by exact search query that was searched for, and gives a bit more visibility into what kind of queries people are using to reach your site. You can click on the keyword to see if it was a Broad Match, Phrase Match, etc.

Day Parts:
This section allows you to view at which times during the day are your visitors coming to your site, and then you can further break it down by day of the week as well.

Destinations URLs:
From this section you can see data per page on your site that is receiving traffic, and then it can be broken down further into by campaign and then as fine grained as per keyword.

Placements:
This section shows where your ads are being shown on the Google Adsense network.

Keyword Positions:
As the name suggests, this section allows you to select a keyword and see how it ranks when your ad is shown.

I’ve only touched on the surface of what can be done here, Google Analytics is extremely powerful with a huge amount of potential!