We often find ourselves having to preemptively explain what might come, or not come, from incorporating more data into our scope. Normally that means merging disparate data source, but even something as simple as appending GA4 website analytics data to our paid ad data can bring confuse a client. Consider that there’s always a difference between Ad Clicks and Website Visits, which most end clients don’t truly consider, nor know how that’s possible. To the average client, a click on an ad is a visit to a website. Not true for some ad extensions (click to call, namely), nor when the Google Business profile is involved.

In Google Ads especially, because of shared and automatically created assets that don’t contain URL parameters that we’d normally use to tag & track our efforts, GA4 data isn’t a true representation of your total advertising efforts. GA4 data is a representation of the site as a whole, inclusive of true organic traffic and traffic that the site would call organic, but was really driven by something else, in particular. Still though, bringing session duration, engagements, and particular Key Events back into our paid ad data and reporting can be illuminating. We just need to be sure the client understands what they’re looking at, and why it looks the way that it does.