This guide will walk you through how to use the Ad + Google Analytics Data connector for Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) to combine and compare your data across your advertising channels.
Before you begin
Authenticate
Make sure you’ve connected and authenticated Ad + Google Analytics Data.
Review fields
This data source doesn’t have every field available in the individual data sources it blends together — it reports on a selection of comparable KPIs for a broad view. You can review the full list of available fields in our technical documentation.
In our documentation, these fields are categorized based on the data source:
- Ad network: The data from these fields comes from your advertising accounts. Use these dimensions and metrics to get ad campaign data from different advertising platforms.
- Google Analytics & Google Analytics Goals: These metrics get data from your Google Analytics account. They contain key metrics for analyzing your website traffic and goals.
- Ad Network + Ga Joins: These join dimensions combine data from your ad network and Google Analytics. Using UTM and demographics data, combine and analyze data from ads and website analytics.
Google Analytics 4 limitations
Note that you can't use Google Analytics and Google Analytics 4 in the same data blend. You can select accounts from Google Analytics and any other data source or select accounts from Google Analytics 4 and any other data source, but both Google Analytics data sources can't be used in the same data blend.
When using Google Analytics 4, pay attention to the following limitations compared to Google Analytics:
- Campaign UTM isn't supported for Google Analytics 4. Use the "Campaign" field instead.
- The metrics and dimensions are all user-scoped versions for compatibility. It's not possible to use session or event-scoped versions.
- "Total events” and "Item quantity" fields are not compatible in Google Analytics 4.
- Goals are not supported in Google Analytics 4.
Instructions
Report on different types of data using Ad + Google Analytics Data.
To easily compare your advertising data, use the dimension Data source and select dimensions or metrics from the Ad network fields.
UTM tags — snippets of text that you can add to a URL to track a source, medium, or campaign name — offer a way to combine ads and Google Analytics data in Supermetrics.
Learn more about UTMs for some of our most popular data sources:
When you create your ad campaign, set the UTM attributes to track where your website data is coming from. This is an example UTM tracking code with values set for utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and utm_content, all of which can be used with the Ad + Google Analytics data connector:
utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=tofu-2020&utm_content=missing-out
The Ad + Google Analytics Data connector only takes into account traffic from utm_medium=cpc when blending ad data with Google Analytics. This is due to the connector combining PPC ad data from multiple platforms, to make sure the website data is accurately comparable. Data from other mediums such as social or email are not taken into account.
In this example, the Source (utm) join field is used to simultaneously look at ad network and website data.
With the Ad + Google Analytics Data connector, you can directly compare your ad platforms' conversions with the Website conversions metric. The connector only takes into account website conversions to make sure conversions are comparable — conversions defined as specific actions within the ad platform, e.g. getting a new follower from your Tweet, won't be calculated.
Example
For example, In Facebook Ads Website conversions includes all Standard Events conversions which happened on your website — e.g. Website Leads and Website Checkouts initiated. In addition, all Custom Conversions you have set up to be tracked on your website with your Pixel will be calculated to the total Website conversions.
All cost-related metrics use the same currency you have selected in the advertising platform.
Changing the currency of an existing ad account is not possible in any of the advertising platforms supported in this connector. If you use different currencies in your ad platforms, you'll need to create new ad accounts with the same currency selection to be able to compare cost metrics.