Tools You Must Integrate With Google Analytics

Well, it really depends on your business and other specific conditions like advertising methods but there are still a few common tools that you should integrate into your Google Analytics setup.

This article is part of Most common Google Analytics issues (in-depth overview) series.

Google Analytics by itself, is an extremely powerful tool that provides us huge amount of data that we can use to improve our businesses. Integrating it with other tools, although, brings it to a whole new level.

Covered in this article

• Integrating Search Console
• Integrating AdWords
• Demographics and Interest Reports
• Other integrations

Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps webmasters to monitor and improve their presence in Google Search results.

Although appearing in search results doesn’t require using Search Console, it helps you to get an overview of what Google already has indexed, and makes it really easy to submit new content for indexing.

It also makes it possible to get an insight on parts of your website that might need a fix, missing pages, errors etc.

You can read more about the Search Console itself here.

Linking Search Console to Google Analytics can help you understand how users find your site through Google search. Identify ways to attract more attention to your site and prioritize development efforts.

Reports related to Search Console data are available in Acquisitions -> Search Console.

This integration will also enable you to easily navigate to related reports in Google Analytics from the Search Console.

How to integrate

The first step is to set up Search Console for your web property (if you haven’t done it already).

You can easily to so by navigating to Search Console in Google Webmaster tools and clicking on “Add a Property”.

During the process you are prompted to validate that you own the website, this is rather straightforward and there are plenty of guides on the web.

Once you are done in the Search Console, go to Admin view in Google Analytics and click on “All Products”.

Find Search Console in the list of products and click to link it. If the Search Console and Google Analytics are under the same account, it should just ask for permission, otherwise, you need to insert your Search Console ID.

After a successful integration, a message saying “Actively linked. Receiving data.” should appear in the products section.

AdWords

Google Adwords is an advertising platform that will help you get new traffic, grow your audience and improve your overall online presence.

While it may not be a perfect solution for every business, it is definitely worth checking if you haven’t already. Read more about AdWords.

Linking your AdWords account with your Google Analytics account will make it possible to get a detailed overview of how your paid traffic is performing. From clicks and general engagement to events and goal conversions.

Not only does it help you to measure the performance of specific ads, you are now able to make decisions that will most probably increase your ROI on paid traffic.

How to integrate

Much like Search Console, all you need to do is make sure you have an AdWords account and the Google Account you are using has at least edit level access to both AdWords and Analytics accounts.

Then navigate to Admin view of your Google Analytics and clicks on “All Products”, find AdWords in the list and click to make the connection.

Once you’re successfully connected you will see the message “Actively linked. Receiving data.”.

Demographics and Interest Reports

Demographics and Interest Reports make Age, Gender and Interest data available in Google Analytics so that you can understand better who your users are. To see this data, you need to enable Advertising Features first.

All you need to do here is to navigate to Admin view and open Property Settings. There you can find Advertising Features and the selector that should be switched to “ON”.

Other Integrations

As mentioned above, Google Analytics is a very powerful tool which can collect data from your website and various other sources related to your business.

Based on your business model you might also want to integrate with tools like Google AdSense, AdExchange, BigQuery, DoubleClick, Google Play and Postpacks for sending conversion data to non-Google advertising networks.

Built-in product based integrations are not the only way to integrate Google Analytics with other tools.

There are ways of collecting usage of different widgets and plugins that you might have on your website, many of them do it automatically by sending data to your Analytics Property via Events or Custom Metrics and Dimensions.

You can even set them up on your own, for example, send events every time a video on your website is started, paused, scrolled and why not even for every 10 seconds the video has been watched?

Conclusion

After going through this article about the possible integrations in Google Analytics, you should be confident that your setup is free from these frequent problems.

• No Search Console Integration
• No AdWords Integration
• Other relevant integrations missing

You should also think of creative ways of measuring the performance of the tools, widgets and plugins that you have installed on your website. For example interacting with the videos, related products or reviews.

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This article is a part of series called Most common Google Analytics issues (in-depth overview)

If you find something missing or misleading, please let us know in the comments.