Adwords PPC Data not Showing in Google Analytics

Having problems with your PPC data not showing in Google Analytics? If you know you are getting clicks but your AdWords data is not showing in analytics and the ‘paid search traffic’ segment is showing a great big zero, the most likely cause of this is that your clicks from AdWords are not ‘tagged’ so Google Analytics can’t tell where they came from.

 

A Four Click Fix

 

Fortunately, this is a real easy one to put right and get your Adwords clicks showing up in analytics so you can segment, track and make sure you are not flushing your clicks down the PPC toilet.

 

1. Sign into Google Adwords and click on ‘My Account’ from the main nav

account settings in google adwords

 

2. From the ‘My Account’ drop down menu click on ‘Preferences’

preferences in google adwords

 

3. On the preferences page go to the ‘Tracking’ section at the bottom (highlighted in yellow in the picture below) and click on ‘Edit’.

enable tracking and auto tagging in analytics

 

 

4. Add a tick to the ‘Destination URL Auto Tagging’ box and then click the ‘Save Changes’ Button.

enabling auto tagging in google adwords

 

 

Happy Advanced Segmenting!

Now your Google AdWords campaign clicks will show up in Google Analytics and you can marry them to conversion tracking and make those clicks count!

 

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29 Responses

  1. Thanks Marcus! Wish I found this 3 hours ago. I am learning more and more that the google support forums are about as useless as they come. I spent hours looking over them and no one knew why the clicks were not being tracked, or gave very vague answers.

    Do you know if this is the default setting? I have done this with other accounts and never remember having to turn on Auto-tagging.

    1. Hey Eric, yeah, it’s kind of annoying. This should be on by default, and usually is, hence, why most people don’t know what to do when it is not turned on.

      That said, I have noticed in two new campaigns with completely new gmail accounts that the tagging was not enabled by default.

      Glad it helped as this is just another one of those random things that can kill an afternoons productivity!

  2. Hi Marcus,

    Just a quick thanks for me for this great post as this was proving to be VERY frustrating. Like so much else with Google it’s hidden in plain sight….

    Now properly set up for all the client accounts that weren’t tracking it so no more guessing!

    Cheers,

    Jonathan

  3. Hi Marcus,

    Thanks for this. I have a slightly different (but relevant!) problem: my clicks are showing but average time on site, average page views per visit, etc. are all showing as zeros. Now, this can’t be right… as I was the one testing out paid search clicks and definitely spent more than 0 seconds on site and viewing more than 0 pages!

    Any idea why this might be happening?

  4. Hey Christian

    It can take a bit of time for these stats to show up, is this some testing you did straight after the event? Also, have you tested this with live traffic to see if it applies to real clicks rather than the ones you are forcing through to test?

    Also (sorry, too many questions), is the tracking working okay for all other traffic?

  5. Hi Marcus, thank you so much of the fix!

    ‘Glad it helped as this is just another one of those random things that can kill an afternoons productivity!’ you are too right there!

  6. Thanks Marcus! You’ve got it straight to the point! I really need this to be able to track my adwords click and to inegrate it with my analytics account. I just home my campaigns would be successful! More power to you!

  7. Marcus thanks for the advice, sadly we have had 3 months of using adwordfs and not thought to even look in analytics, is there any way of pulling the past adwords data over ? or is it stuck in adwords never to be seen in analytics…cheers

    1. Hey, nope, that’s pretty much lost. You could do some log file analysis to get some more info but Analytics is pretty powerful in and of itself. What are you looking to find out? (signing off for the long weekend but will get back to you).

  8. Another thanks for me Marcus – glad I found your post! I have tracked Adwords with no problems before in a dozen or so accounts, some pretty well established, some brand new, and never had to do this before!

    Cheers
    Simon

  9. Hi,Marcus,
    We do auto-tagging, and adwords connect to GA acount. But show wrong data on GA. We got test way from google “?gclid=test”

    Then we use on first page http://www.xxx.com/?gclid=test it is ok, not turn out.

    When we use landing page: http://www.xxx.com/landingpage/?gclid=test , load the landing page with “?gclid=test”
    Then the landing page turn to http://www.xxx.com/landingpage (no show ?gclid=test. )

    Do you know why ?

    Thanks with Best Regards,
    Andy

  10. This one was quite helpful, many thanks Marcus. Google products are becoming more and more sophisticated and in my opinion sometimes features are duplicated which creates more confusion…

    Anyway, I just refreshed and I start to see the click count for Adwords on GA!

  11. Marcus,

    Thanks for the post. One quick question, I have followed all the steps above to link my adwords / analytics account. I still get “not set” in the paid section under keywords. Any ideas?

    Thanks!!

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