Universal Analytics: how to link it to your advertising platforms?
Connecting your advertising platforms to Universal Analytics will allow you to gain additional insight on what your visitors and audience do on your website after clicking on your ad. Having your ads metrics in universal analytics will help you understand if your landing pages are performing well or are confusing to the user, or if your audience is getting stuck somewhere.
In the end, combining your ad data with other metrics can help you optimize your advertising strategy and improve your performance. Also, if you’re using our Clever Ads Manager mobile app you’ll be able to gather deeper advertising insights when connecting analytics, and have all your advertising platforms data properly tracked there.
Let’s learn how to track your ad metrics in the main advertising platforms.
Track Google Ads metrics in Universal Analytics
The first step is linking your Google Ads account to Universal Analytics. To do that you can:
Go to Analytics > Select “Admin” > find Google Ads Linking under “Property”
Then you’ll just need to click on the Google Ads accounts you want to link and then click “Continue”.
It’s important that you have auto-tagging enabled in Google Ads so data is properly reported between platforms. Take into consideration that there are some data discrepancies between platforms. For instance, Google Ads reports each visit as a click and Analytics reports a session as a visit, so you can find the same action represented as two clicks for Google Ads and one session for Universal Analytics.
Once Google Ads is linked to Universal Analytics you’ll be able to see your Google Ads data inside the platform, such as your campaigns, keywords, search queries, shopping data or display targeting.
Track Facebook Ads metrics in Universal Analytics
Facebook has its own Facebook Ads Manager, however it can be limited if you want to track the full user journey or your user behaviour once they get to your site.
Normally, you’ll see all traffic coming to your site from Facebook under the referrer facebook.com, including not only your Facebook ads traffic but also traffic coming from your posts. If you want to track exactly which traffic comes from your Facebook ad campaigns, ad sets, and ads you’ll need to use UTM parameters in the URLs you include in your Facebook ads.
You can do so directly from the Facebook ads manager, when creating your ads. Under the URL parameters section, you can select “Build a URL Parameter”. We recommend you to set it the following way:
- Campaign source – Facebook
- Medium – PPC
- Campaign name – the name of the Facebook ads campaign
You can also add custom parameters to include the Ad Set name and the Ad Name, but it depends on the granularity you want to reach when tracking your campaigns.
Then, on Google Analytics, you just need to analyze your Facebook Ads performance by going to:
Acquisition tab > All Traffic > Source/Medium > Select Campaign in the secondary dropdown
There you’ll be able to see your Facebook ads campaigns performance. If you want to check it at an ad set or ad level, just add custom dimensions from the admin panel on the property settings.
Track Microsoft Ads metrics in Universal Analytics
To properly see Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads) campaign metrics on Universal Analytics, you also need to set up UTMs, same as on Facebook. However, there’s an automatic way to do it through enabling the automatic markup the following way:
Accounts & billing > Account tab > Add UTM tags to my landing page URLs
Then, if you already had added manual tags to your campaigns you can select “keep my existing tags” or “replace all existing tabs” with automatically generated ones if you hadn’t created UTM tags yet.
Track Twitter Ads metrics in Universal Analytics
For tracking Twitter Ads traffic in your Universal Analytics account you can use UTMs in the links you use in your ads, the same as we explained for the other advertising platforms. Remember you can always use Google’s UTM builder for creating your URLs with parameters.
