Blended Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads in Looker Studio

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Blending GA4 (Google Analytics 4) and Google Ads data gives marketers a complete view of their customer journey. It helps them understand how ads drive website behavior, making it easier to optimize campaigns and spend money more wisely. By combining these insights, marketers can improve their strategies and get better results.

In this article, I will teach you how to blend data from these two sources, but firstly, check out the video tutorial:

Setup and task – blend GA4 and Google Ads

First of all, we start with creating demonstrative tables to show what data we have and to understand what we have to blend.

Having analyzed the tables, we can see that these tables give us different sets of data, but one column is in common – Campaign. Based on this column we can start blending our data. 

Creating a blend

In fact, we need to create a filter for Google Analytics 4 data source so that session source/medium contains only google/cpc data.

So, let’s create a new table with Google Analytics data, add this filter and start blending data. 

Here is how the filter condition looks like. 

We have to blend data based on campaign and date. Keep in mind that in Google Ads the field “Date” is named “Day”, so our blend will show us day by day data. 

To the metrics we have to add the fields we were using in demonstrative tables. To clarify, for Google Analytics we choose active users, conversions and sessions, and for Google Ads we choose Cost, Impressions and Clicks. 

As a type of join we choose Full Outer join because this one is the most suitable in this case. It will allow us not to miss any data. And joining has to be based both on date and campaign fields, so there are two conditions. 

The data we blended allows us to make various transformations and create custom formulas (it wouldn’t be possible without blending data). 

Conclusion

I hope this article was useful for you. Check out our report template Compare Google Analytics 4 and Ads data for online store for analyzing your store’s performance data from Google Analytics 4, Google Ads and other ads platforms.