Written by Elias Saliba | Founder, Adchievers
Elias is a paid advertising specialist with over a decade of hands-on experience running campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and X for 250+ clients across 28+ countries. He has personally managed over $30M in ad spend and writes from real-world campaign experience, not theory.
Introduction
What can Google Ads do with audiences from Google Analytics? If you have been running both tools separately, you are leaving one of the most powerful features in Google’s advertising ecosystem completely unused. Connecting Google Analytics to Google Ads unlocks the ability to target people based on what they actually did on your website, not just what they searched for. This guide breaks down exactly how this works, whether Google Ad Grants are worth it for eligible organisations, and how Search Ads 360 fits into the broader Google product world.
Why Connecting Google Analytics to Google Ads Matters
Most people think of Google Ads as a keyword tool. You pick keywords, write ads, and show up in search results. That is true, but it only tells half the story. The other half is about who you are reaching, and that is where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics tracks everything that happens on your website. Which pages people visit. How long they stay. Whether they added something to their cart. Whether they left without buying. This behavioural data tells you exactly because it reveals not only what users searched for, but also how they interacted with your website after arriving.
When you link both accounts, you can bring that behavioural data directly into Google Ads and use it to build audiences, adjust bids, and make your campaigns far more precise. If you use Google Tag Manager to manage your site tags, linking GA4 through it also makes the setup cleaner and easier to maintain across multiple pages.
What Google Ads Can Actually Do With Google Analytics Audiences
Remarketing to Website Visitors
This is the most common use case and one of the highest-returning strategies in paid advertising. When someone visits your website but does not convert, Google Analytics records that visit. Once linked to Google Ads, you can retarget that person with ads across Google Search, YouTube, Display, and Gmail.
For search campaigns specifically, this is managed through RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads), which lets you adjust bids or show entirely different ads when a past website visitor searches for your keywords again. You are not targeting strangers anymore. You are focusing on users who have already expressed interest in your products or services. That alone typically drives a much lower cost per conversion compared to cold audience campaigns.
Building Custom Audience Segments
Google Analytics lets you build audience segments based on very specific behaviour inside Audience Manager, the centralised hub inside Google Ads where all your audiences are stored and managed. You can create an audience of people who visited your pricing page but did not fill out your contact form. Or people who spent more than three minutes on your website. Or people who visited four or more pages in a single session.
Each of these audience segments reflects a distinct stage of user intent. When you bring them into Google Ads, you can tailor your message to exactly where that person is in the decision-making process. Someone who read your pricing page gets a different ad than someone who only landed on your homepage.
Adjusting Bids Based on User Behaviour
Audience data from Google Analytics also allows you to adjust how much you bid for different groups of people. You might decide to bid 30 percent higher for users who have already visited your website three or more times, because those people are clearly interested and more likely to convert. You might bid lower for people who only visited once and left quickly.
This is called bid adjustment, and it is one of the most effective ways to stretch a fixed budget further without changing your overall campaign structure.
Smart Bidding Uses This Data Automatically
If you use Google’s Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA or Target ROAS, the algorithm already factors in audience signals from Google Analytics when calculating bids in real time. The more data you feed into the system, the smarter the bidding becomes. Linking Analytics gives the algorithm more signals to work with, which generally leads to better performance over time.
Enabling Google Signals in your GA4 property adds an extra layer here. It allows Google to track users across devices when they are signed into their Google account, which gives Smart Bidding richer cross-device behavioural data to work with.
Customer Match and First-Party Data
Beyond website behaviour, Google Ads also supports Customer Match, which lets you upload your own first-party data such as customer email lists directly into Google Ads. When combined with GA4 audience segments, this gives you a powerful combination of on-site behaviour and owned CRM data to build highly targeted audience layers. In a post-third-party-cookie environment, first-party data strategies like this are becoming the most reliable foundation for audience targeting.
Finding New Customers Who Look Like Existing Ones
Google Analytics audiences can also be used to build similar audiences. If you have a segment of people who completed a purchase on your website, Google can analyse what they have in common and find new users who share those characteristics. This bridges the gap between remarketing and new customer acquisition.
Are Google Ad Grants Worth It?
Google Ad Grants is a programme that gives registered non-profit organisations up to ten thousand US dollars per month in free Google Search advertising credits. If your organisation qualifies, the question of whether it is worth it almost answers itself. Free advertising budget is genuinely valuable.
But there are conditions attached. Ad Grant campaigns can only run on Google Search, not Display or YouTube. They can only target keywords with a maximum bid of two dollars, which locks out most highly competitive search terms. Your account must maintain a minimum five percent click-through rate, and your ads must link to the non-profit’s own website.
In practice, Google Ad Grants work best for non-profits with informational content, volunteer recruitment, donation campaigns, and awareness programmes where lower competition keywords are plentiful. For organisations trying to compete in highly saturated spaces, the two dollar bid cap can limit reach significantly.
The honest answer is this: if you are eligible, apply. Even with the restrictions, ten thousand dollars a month in free search traffic is a meaningful resource. Just understand the limitations upfront and build your strategy around them rather than against them.
What Google Products Can Search Ads 360 Integrate With?
Search Ads 360 is Google’s advanced platform designed for managing and optimizing search advertising campaigns at the enterprise level. It sits within the Google Marketing Platform, which is Google’s unified suite of advertising and analytics tools for large advertisers and agencies. Understanding what Search Ads 360 integrates with helps you see where it fits in a broader marketing stack.
Google Ads
The core integration. Search Ads 360 pulls in all your Google Ads campaigns, giving you a unified management interface where you can adjust budgets, bids, and strategies across accounts from one place.
Display and Video 360
Search Ads 360 integrates with Display and Video 360, Google’s platform for programmatic display and YouTube advertising. This connection lets you see search and display campaign performance side by side and make budget decisions based on the full picture.
Google Analytics 4
Search Ads 360 connects with GA4 to pull in conversion and audience data. This means your search campaigns can use Analytics audiences for targeting and remarketing, exactly as described earlier in this article but at a much larger scale.
Campaign Manager 360
This integration allows cross-channel attribution tracking through Floodlight Tags, which are Campaign Manager 360’s tracking pixels that fire across your site and record conversions across channels. You can see which touchpoints across search, display, and other channels contributed to a conversion, giving you a clearer view of the actual customer journey rather than just last-click data. Search Ads 360 also supports data-driven attribution, which distributes conversion credit across all touchpoints based on their actual contribution rather than assigning it entirely to the last click.
Microsoft Advertising
Search Ads 360 also integrates with Microsoft’s ad platform, allowing large advertisers to manage Google and Bing campaigns from the same interface. This is particularly useful for global advertisers where Bing has meaningful market share.
Looker Studio
For reporting, Search Ads 360 data can be connected to Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), allowing you to build custom dashboards that pull performance data from Search Ads 360 alongside other Google Marketing Platform sources in one unified view.
Practical Tips for Getting the Most From Analytics and Google Ads
- Link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts as soon as possible, even if you are not ready to use the audience data immediately. Audiences need time to build before they are large enough.
- Start with simple remarketing before moving to complex segments. Retargeting all website visitors is the easiest first step and often delivers the fastest return.
- Review your Analytics audiences regularly inside Audience Manager and refresh them as your website and offer evolve.
- Enable Google Signals in GA4 to improve cross-device audience matching and give Smart Bidding better data to work with.
- If you manage campaigns for multiple clients, make sure Analytics is linked and conversion tracking is verified before any campaign goes live.
- For Search Ads 360, only consider it if you are managing significant monthly ad spend, typically above fifty thousand dollars per month. Below that threshold, native Google Ads tools are more than sufficient.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to pay extra to use Google Analytics audiences in Google Ads?
No. Linking Google Analytics to Google Ads and using those audiences for targeting is free. You only pay for the clicks your ads generate, same as any other Google Ads campaign.
How long does it take to build a usable remarketing audience?
Google requires a minimum of one thousand users in a Display remarketing audience and one thousand monthly active users for Search remarketing before ads can run. For a website with steady traffic, this can happen within days. For newer or lower traffic sites, it may take a few weeks.
Are Google Ad Grants available in all countries?
Google Ad Grants is available in most countries where Google Ads operates. Google bases eligibility on your non-profit status in each respective country. You can check eligibility and apply directly through Google for Nonprofits.
Can I run YouTube ads using Google Ad Grants?
No. Google Ad Grants is restricted to Google Search campaigns only. YouTube, Display, and other Google advertising channels require paid budget.
Is Search Ads 360 the same as Google Ads?
No. Google Ads is the standard platform that most advertisers use. Search Ads 360 is an enterprise tool built on top of it within the Google Marketing Platform, designed for large-scale management across multiple accounts, search engines, and markets simultaneously. Most small to mid-sized businesses do not need Search Ads 360.
What happens if my Google Analytics audiences are too small to use?
Google will not serve your ads to those audiences until they reach the minimum size threshold. In the meantime, you can run broader targeting campaigns to build website traffic, which will grow your audience pools faster.
About the Author
Elias Saliba is the founder of Adchievers, a performance marketing agency managing paid advertising across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and X for clients in 28+ countries. With over $30M in managed ad spend and 250+ clients worldwide, every article Elias writes comes from real campaign experience.
Work With Adchievers
Adchievers is a performance-first paid advertising agency managing campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and X for clients in 28+ countries. If you want to make your Google Ads work harder with smarter audience targeting and data-driven strategy, we can help. Visit adchievers.me to get started.