How Agencies Use Google Analytics 4 to Improve Ad Campaigns

We all know about Google Analytics – it helps us understand who came to our website, which pages users visited, how long they stayed, where they came from, and much more about the website. However, did you know that all this information can be helpful in optimizing your Meta Ads and Google Ads?

Well, if you didn’t know, you need to know to improve the performance of ad campaigns. Because for performance marketing agencies running ad campaigns, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) isn’t just a website tracking tool — it’s a powerful engine for performance measurement, audience insights, and customer journey mapping.

What data do you get from Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics is a tool that provides all the data for each and every activity that happens on the website. From the number of users visiting the website to what they do on the website, everything is there on Google Analytics.

How many people visited the website
Who are the website visitors – age, gender, location, etc.
Which pages did they go to
Where did they come from – social media, ads, search engine, etc.
Which device and browser did they use
How long did they stay on each page
Which product pages did they visited most
Which forms did they fill
Did they add any items to cart
Did they check out the cart

Now that we know what Google Analytics provides, let’s decode how agencies use all of this data to optimise their clients’ ad campaigns.

1. Measurement of Ad Campaign Performance

When a user clicks on an ad, where does the user land? Usually, it is a website or a landing page. It can sometimes be a form as well. When a user visits the website after clicking on the ad, all that the user does is registered on Google Analytics.

Agency professionals use this data on Google Analytics to know if the user took the action for which they ran the ad for. This way, Google Analytics helps in identifying if the objective of the ad campaign is fulfilled or not, which in turn helps in measurement of the performance of the ad campaign. This measurement helps in identifying if the campaigns are working or not, so that they don’t spend on campaigns that are not performing well and invest that amount in the ones that are working or new ad campaigns.

2. Target Audience Optimization

Targeting the right audience for a brand is an important part of running an ad campaign. Google Analytics tells everything about the user who visits the website, including user demographics.

Age, gender, language
Location
The device they used to visit the website
Operating system
Browser

All of this data helps a marketing agency collect data about the users who visit a website. Agency professionals use this data for the following:

To identify the target audience for new brands
To refine or redefine the target audience for existing ad campaigns

3. Map the Customer Journey from Ad to Checkout

Once a user clicks on the ad, they are taken to the website or the landing page. Once the user is on the website, Google Analytics tracks each and every activity of the user on the website as an ‘event’.

This data helps agency professionals to create a customer journey map and identify where the user comes in the ad funnel. Answers to questions like this help create this map:

Where did the user come from
Where did the user go from the landing page
Did the user add any items to the cart?
Did the user check out

Answers to these questions helps agency professionals to categorise the users in the ad funnel. On the basis of this categorisation, they decide which users to retarget and which ones not to.

What if you are an e-commerce brand using Shopify?

Shopify is a commonly used platform for e-commerce websites. It has built-in analytics, which shows the order value, website visits, page visits, etc, but it is not as detailed as Google Analytics. Google Analytics extends its analysis to user and their activity in detail as we saw above.

Performance marketing agencies use Google Analytics and Shopify Analytics together to get a detailed analysis of the website and users. Shopify Analytics helps in getting the sales data, and Google Analytics helps in getting the detailed user and user behaviour analysis.

Growing your business using Google Analytics and Meta, and Google Ads

To run a successful ad campaign, it is important to understand not just Meta and Google Ads but Google Analytics as well. While Google Analytics can be complex to understand with so much jargon like event, attribution, traffic sources, etc., we are here to help you.

At The Pencil Advertising, we help D2C brands scale their business online successfully with the help of performance marketing. Our professionals have expertise in Google Ads, Meta Ads, and Google Analytics. They use insights from data from Google Analytics to optimize the ad campaigns running on Meta and Google at every stage.

If you’re looking to grow your sales with performance marketing, connect with us. DM us on Instagram.