How to Link Google Ads to GA4 (Step by Step)

Linking your Google Ads account to a GA4 property gives you the complete customer journey: how people interact with your campaigns, what they do on your website or in your app, and finally how they complete the goals you set (for example, a purchase). It also lets you export GA4 key events and audiences to Google Ads for bidding and remarketing.

How to link Google Ads to GA4

1. Make sure you have at least the Editor role in your GA4 property.

2. Check that you have Administrator access to the Google Ads accounts you want to link.

3. Open your Google Analytics 4 property.

4. Go to Admin in the left-hand menu.

5. Under PRODUCT LINKS, click Google Ads links.

6. Click Link.

7. Click Choose Google Ads accounts.

8. Select the Google Ads accounts you want to link and click Confirm. Only accounts where you have administrator access will be listed.

9. Click Next.

In the next view you can, if needed, turn off Enable Personalized Advertising and Enable Auto-Tagging. Neither is required.
To turn off Auto-Tagging, expand that section and select Leave my auto-tagging settings as they are.
With Personalized Advertising off, audiences and remarketing events/parameters will not be exported to the Google Ads account.
With Auto-Tagging off, Google Analytics will not automatically associate Google Ads data with customer clicks.
Click Next.

10. Review all the configuration details and click Submit.

If you see a window like the one below…

…your GA4 property is correctly linked to Google Ads.
It can take up to 24 hours for the changes to apply; only then will the link start feeding data into GA4 reports.

Linking the accounts is a precondition for meaningful optimization: only then does Google Ads see what happens with traffic after the click, not just the click itself. We describe how we use that data when running campaigns on our Google Ads agency page.