GA4 and Google Ads

Linking GA4 to Google Ads lets you import GA4 conversions, now called key events, and audiences straight into your campaigns.

You are running Google Analytics 4 alongside your ad account, and you want the two to talk to each other. Linking them means the actions you already track in GA4, and the audience lists you have built there, become available inside Google Ads. You can bid toward a GA4 key event and retarget a GA4 audience without rebuilding any of it from scratch.

This is genuinely useful when GA4 sees things the ad tag cannot, like an engaged session that only makes sense once you stitch together several page views. The link lets that richer picture feed your campaigns, and it saves you from maintaining two separate definitions of the same audience across two platforms. Remember that Google renamed conversions to key events in GA4, so when you go looking for something to import, that is the label you are hunting for. The concept is the same as before; the vocabulary changed.

Here is the trap. GA4's attribution and its key-event counting do not match Google Ads conversion tracking, and if you import the same action from both sources, you count it twice. Your reported conversions inflate, your cost per conversion looks better than it is, and Smart Bidding optimizes toward a number that was never real. Decide which tool owns each conversion and count it exactly once.

Pick one source of truth per action, or you will spend real money chasing a double-counted mirage.