Introduction
Digital marketers today work on multiple tools, analyzing platform-specific data sets. Marketers who use Google’s platforms can enjoy the advantage of its wide array of products to link between several marketing tools, which can expose new insights and opportunities.
Two of the most used Google products are Google Ads (formerly called Google Adwords), for running paid ad campaigns, and Google Search Console (also known as GSC), a free SEO tool for marketers and website owners that helps to analyze organic traffic. These tools are among the most common tools used in online marketing.
Google Search Console is also where marketers upload their sitemaps to and index new and revised pages, to request Googlebot to crawl the updated pages. Online marketers can also use their GSC account to analyze some technical aspects which affect site loading speed and user experience.
But instead of looking at these two Google tools separately, online marketers should link both platforms to enjoy a more holistic view of how their paid and organic traffic work together.
Once the accounts are linked, the combined query data sets will be visible in the Paid and Organic report on Google Ads.
Benefits of Linking Google Ads to Google Search Console
Throughout my career, I’ve managed both Google Ads and SEO for more than 20 online shops, and I’ve enjoyed multiple benefits from linking Google tools to GSC. Here’s why you should link Google Ads to Search Console.
Firstly, it allows you to see performance from both platforms in one report – no more need to toggle between Google Ads and GSC. This is very convenient and can save digital marketers a lot of time!
It’s also a great way to break silos between your paid search and SEO teams – paid search and SEO both show results on Google’s SERP that are relevant to your target audience. From my experience, this is a common issue in many companies. By enabling the paid search team to view organic results, the marketing team can get a better understanding of what potential customers are looking for.
By combining Google Search Console data with your Google Ads data, you can discover new keyword opportunities – maybe your website gets organic results for search terms you’re currently not targeting with your PPC campaigns. This gives your PPC team ideas for new keywords to target in their ad account.
And lastly, linking GSC to Google Ads makes it easier for marketers to optimize ad spend and efforts between the paid and organic channels. This can be super valuable to improve overall ROI.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you manage Google ad campaigns for a rug vendor and one of your keywords is ‘handmade jute rugs’. You might be spending hundreds of dollars a month on this specific keyword and the ROAS isn’t very satisfying. Then you look at the Paid and organic report and notice you’re getting significant organic traffic for this exact term, and additional free traffic for related long tail keywords.
If you see your client’s pages don’t rank well enough to generate significant organic traffic to an important page, you can increase the bid to the most relevant keywords.
By decreasing the bid on this keyword, or by pausing it altogether in case performance is poor, you can improve your overall ROAS without having a significant impact on sales.
One last use case would be when you identify important keywords in your ad account where the CPC is just too high. While a high CPC is a strong signal for a competitive keyword, it might be worth the shot to try to target this keyword with SEO tactics, e.g. by optimizing a landing page around it.
Data You’ll See in the Paid and Organic Report
While there’s no reason not to link Google ads with GSC, marketers should be aware of a few limitations of the combined data sources.
For starters, the combined report doesn’t include search queries from Google Shopping ads or Performance Max campaigns. The only Google Ads data shown is from text ads in search campaigns.
The report also doesn’t show any conversion data and doesn’t expose any type of conversions from organic results. This is not possible within Google Ads or Search Console, as no tracking tag has been set up for organic Google search results. To see sales coming from organic traffic, you should use Google Analytics 4.
The default report includes the following columns: query, search result type, campaign, ad group, clicks, and impressions. Other metrics such as CPC (cost per click) and CTR (click-through rate) can be added.
The added value comes from the second column, the search results type. That’s where you’ll learn whether a search query gained clicks only from ads, only from organic, or from both channels.
Your current rankings for organic queries are only available in Search Console.
Another point to consider is you’ll only see your SEO historical data starting from the date when you linked Google Ads and Search Console. Any Google Search Console data from before that won’t be shown.
How to Link Google Ads to Google Search Console
In order to link the two accounts, one must have administrative access to the Google Account, as well as have a Google Search Console account with owner permissions for your domain. If you’re not the owner of this domain, a request will be sent to an owner once you try to link the accounts from Google Ads’ end.
The linking process is pretty straightforward:
- On your Google Ads account, click on the tools & settings menu.
- Click linked accounts.
- On this screen, look for the Google Search Console section and click on details.
- In the new screen that will open, click proceed and follow the instructions.
Conclusion
Paid search campaigns and SEO are essential elements in every digital marketing strategy. By linking Google Ads to the Google Search Console you get a holistic view of your search marketing results, both paid and organic. While this extensive data set will not reveal any leads or sales coming from organic clicks, it can generate valuable insights that will help you optimize your Google ads campaigns, your organic traffic, and your overall ROI.
Further Reading:
- PPC vs. SEO: Which One Is Better? Pros, Cons, And When To Use Which
- 29 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid on Ecommerce Websites
- How to Create a Google Ads Search Campaign for Ecommerce: A Step-by-step Guide
- 13 Ways To Optimize Google Shopping Ads (In A Profitable Way)
- Google Ads Bidding Strategies: The Ultimate Guide (And Which One To Use)
