Linking multiple Analytics accounts to Adwords
Posted by tomachi on October 28th, 2009 filed in Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Online MarketingSome handy info here from the GAAC* Program Google Group.
The question was posed that while it is true that you can link several adwords accounts to one anaytics account by having these accounts pull in the “cost data” from many Adwords accounts, people were wondering whether it is possible to link several analytics accounts to one adwords account?
The answer provided was that the “linking” that adds the AW cost source to GA and lets you see GA data from within the AW interface, works in certain regards on a 1-1 basis only.
Adding cost sources, though, can be done from multiple AW accounts to multiple GA accounts, all you need is a skillful Google account manager to do that for you. After this has been done, you can, as you probably already know, go in every profile of every GA account you have added a cost source
to and apply/unapply it. This type of setup can be seen below with a live screenshot of an Analytics account with 2 cost sources attached but only one of them “applied” with the tick:
Apply Cost Data GA
One important thing to bear in mind though: Only the first (primary) adwords account you link will enable you to pull analytics goals to adwords. The others will be secondary cost sources. This primarily linked GA account would be the one that appears when you click the GA tab in Adwords:
Google Analytics tab in Adwords
In some cases it is crucial “who to link first” i.e. first linkage you do manually and second via account manager - just make sure the first linked account is the main GA+AdWords activity in order to best integrate.
*GAAC stands for Google Adwords Certified Professional.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:32 pm
I just don’t get it why Google made such a big PooPoo with this GA and AdWords accounts mess. Why can’t I link multiple GA accounts to multiple GW? Why can’t I transfer GA data to another account? Ahh, so many questions, such a big mess…
I think goog needs some clearification and/or accounts rebuild todo..
June 30th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
How is it possible to manage ads for multiple websites? I was hoping to link all analytic accounts to one adword account. I am new to ad words and was hoping someone could help me out. I run a tutoring business in three different cities and each city has its own website. I have heard of the My Client Center. Do I need to learn how to use this in order to manage multiple adword campaigns for multiple sites?
July 20th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Hi Chad,
best practice is to just have one adwords account per website, and one analytics account (not profile) per website also.
However, the world isn’t perfect and sometimes you have to deal with what you have. If you want, its perfectly fine to use a single adwords account to send traffic to multiple websites (one domain per adgroup), I in fact do this every day with for http://www.imallbrands.com where I work at the moment.
Assuming your multiple websites do have completely separate analytics accounts here is the solution: you actually have to manually request linkage via a Google staff member, by using the help system. You will need to supply the adwords account ID, and the analytics account IDs you wish it to be linked to. After that you should be able to see clicks, cost, and impressions in analytics, plus the keyword positions report which is mighty handy.
Once linked, you can see which adwords account is linked from the analtyics settings screen. Hope this helps?