Connect Google Ads
Connect your Google Ads account and Bread & Butter turns the long numbers in your Google Ads traffic into the campaign and ad group names you recognize. It places every visit from a Google ad under the campaign, ad group and keyword it really came from, using Google's own record of the click, even when the UTM tags on the ad are missing or wrong. And it brings your spend in, so you can see what a Focused visitor really costs you, campaign by campaign and keyword by keyword.
It takes about a minute. You choose your Google account, pick the Google Ads account, and you're done. There's no developer token to find and no Customer ID to copy.
In short: Go to Integrations, choose Google Ads, choose your Google account and pick the Google Ads account. Once connected, campaign and ad group IDs show as names, past visits included, and every Google Ads visit is matched to its click, so it lands under the right campaign and keyword whatever the UTM tags say. Your spend, cost per click and cost per 1,000 impressions come in straight away, and after your first 15 days you also see what each Focused visitor really costs. Each campaign and keyword gets a Scale, Watch or Investigate verdict once Bread & Butter is 90% confident about it, judged against your own account. Bread & Butter only reads your Google Ads data and never changes your campaigns.
What you need
The Pro plan. Google Ads is part of the Pro plan. You can connect it during your free trial.
A Google account with access to your Google Ads account. Read access is enough. If your agency runs your ads from a manager account, use a Google account that can see your account under it.
Connect Google Ads
- Go to Integrations and choose Google Ads. You can also click Connect Google Ads next to any Google Ads number on Opportunities, on a visitor's journey or in the Attribution report.
- Click Connect Google Ads and choose your Google account.
- Pick the Google Ads account for this website. If your Google account can see only one Google Ads account, Bread & Butter picks it for you. Manager accounts aren't listed, so pick the account under them. Canceled accounts don't appear either.
- You're back on the page you started from, and the Google Ads card under Integrations shows the account name, when it was connected and when it last synced.
One account per website. Each website in Bread & Butter connects to one Google Ads account. If you run several websites, connect each one to its own account.
Bread & Butter only reads. Google shows the same wording for every Google Ads connection, including "see, edit, create, and delete", because Google Ads has a single permission for every app that connects to it. Bread & Butter only reads your campaign, click and keyword data and never changes anything in your account: not your campaigns, budgets, bids or ads. If you'd rather be certain, connect with a Google user that has read-only access to your Google Ads account.
What changes once you're connected
Names instead of numbers.
Google Ads can only send IDs in your links, never names. So utm_content=189993294432 is an ad group ID, and it means nothing to the person reading the dashboard. Once you're connected, Bread & Butter shows the name instead: on Opportunities, on visitor journeys, in the Attribution report, in the Journey Summary, in the Intelligence Brief and in your CSV exports. Past visits are resolved too, not only new ones. If you rename a campaign in Google Ads, Bread & Butter shows the new name.
Every Google Ads visit placed by the click itself.
Without a connection, a visit from a Google ad lands under the right campaign only if the UTM tags on the ad were set up correctly, and keywords are often missing altogether. Once you're connected, Bread & Butter matches each visit to Google's own record of the click and places it under its campaign, ad group and keyword. Where there's no click record, it falls back to the campaign ID Google adds to the link, then to your UTM tags. When the click and the tags disagree, the click wins in your reports, and your UTM tags stay on the visit exactly as they were typed. Google keeps click details for about 90 days, so on the day you connect, Bread & Butter goes back through the last 90 days of Google Ads visits and fills them in. After that, it matches each day's clicks the following day.
The campaign filter on the People list, the campaign list and its counts all follow the same rule, so a campaign shows the same people wherever you look at it. The Insights tab shows how many Google Ads visits needed the match, with the Focused visitors and Engaged Leads among them, and the Ads Spend report breaks them down by reason and tells you what to fix in Google Ads.
Your spend, straight away.
Spend, cost per click (CPC) and cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) come in for each campaign and keyword as soon as you connect. The first sync starts straight away, and it refreshes every 15 minutes after that.
What a Focused visitor really costs.
Bread & Butter divides your cost per click by the share of visitors who were Focused. If a quarter of the visitors from a campaign are Focused, each Focused visitor costs four times your cost per click. That gives you Focused CPC (the cost of each Focused visitor) and Focused CPM (the cost of 1,000 Focused visitors). A cheap click that brings no Focused visitors stops looking cheap. These figures need a little history, so they appear once your account's first 15 days are over. See What is the Focused CPM?
Scale, Watch or Investigate.
Each campaign, ad group and keyword is judged against your own account's paid Focused Rate, the share of your paid visitors who are Focused. It isn't compared with other advertisers. Scale means Bread & Butter is 90% confident it does better than your paid average, and Investigate means it is 90% confident it does worse. Watch is given when the data never reaches 90% confidence either way. Before a verdict, each item shows its status: Calibrating, with the date a verdict is expected; Learning · waiting for Google, while Google's bid strategy for the campaign is in its learning phase; or Up next. Keywords with too little traffic to judge alone are judged with their ad group, or with their campaign. Every verdict shows how many days of data it rests on, and after a verdict the item goes into a second round that counts only what happened afterwards, so you can see whether the change you made worked.
The first verdicts arrive on day 15 at the latest, and often sooner, because the 90 days of Google Ads visits from before you connected count. The Insights tab shows six campaigns and six keywords on rotation, two of each verdict; every campaign and keyword is in the Ads Spend report. Bread & Butter never tells you to pause anything; that decision stays with you. See How do I use the Attribution report to optimize my marketing budget?
Your UTM tags still help.
With Google Ads connected, a visit with wrong or missing tags still lands under the right campaign, so the tags are no longer what your Google Ads reporting depends on. They're still worth setting up once: they cover the visits Google sends without a click record, they keep the visit readable in every other tool you use, and they're the only source for your other ad platforms. See How to set up UTM to maximize visibility into high-intent traffic.
The Ads Spend report in your AI assistant.
With Google Ads connected, you can run the Ads Spend report in Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini or Mistral Vibe: what each campaign type, campaign, keyword and landing page costs per Focused visitor and per Engaged Lead, with its status or verdict, Google's conversions next to the people who raised their hand, the visits your UTM tags missed, up to three budget shifts at the same total spend, and a timeline of what each change you made in Google Ads did. You can also ask your own questions, such as "Which keywords bring Focused visitors who never come back?" See Ads Spend report and Bread & Butter MCP server connections.
Manage the connection
Check it's working. The Google Ads card under Integrations shows the connected account, who connected it and when, and the last sync.
Change the account. Connect again and pick a different account. The new account replaces the old one, and names are looked up again from it.
If Google access stops working. This can happen when someone changes their password or removes access in Google. The card shows the problem, with a Reconnect button. Until you reconnect, new names, click matches and spend stop coming in.
If Google's daily limit is reached. Names, click matching and spend each sync on their own schedule. If Google's daily limit for the account is reached, syncing pauses and picks up where it left off, with nothing for you to do.
Disconnect. Click Disconnect on the card. Syncing stops, and Google Ads numbers show as numbers again, with the Connect Google Ads prompt.
When your trial ends. Your connection and syncing carry on. On the Free plan, names show as Upgrade to connect Google Ads and the verdicts on the Insights tab are locked until you upgrade, and everything is there the moment you do.
When you still see a number or a blank
A number instead of a name. There are four usual reasons:
- Google Ads isn't connected for this website yet.
- The number belongs to a different Google Ads account from the one you connected.
- The campaign or ad group was deleted in Google Ads.
- You changed your tracking template in the last 24 to 48 hours. Google takes that long to apply changes to live ads.
A blank UTM field. Google leaves a ValueTrack value empty when it has nothing to insert, and that's normal. One case to know about: if you use AI Max for Search, keyword-less matches arrive with an empty {keyword}. With Google Ads connected, the keyword is filled in from the click wherever Google has one.
A visit with no click record. Some Google Ads visits arrive without a click ID, for example some clicks on iPhones. Those are placed by the campaign ID in the link, then by your UTM tags. That's normal, not an error.
Why Google Ads and Bread & Butter count differently
Google counts its own conversion actions: every action set up in the account, more than once per person, and including view-through conversions, where someone saw an ad and visited later. Bread & Butter counts Engaged Leads, people who gave you a verified email address, each counted once, and carries on to the deals you mark Won/Closed. The gap between the two is useful. Smart Bidding buys more of whatever it's told is a conversion, so a campaign type with many conversions and few Engaged Leads, often Performance Max, is one where Google is learning the wrong thing. The Ads Spend report puts the two side by side for every campaign type, with Won/Closed next to them.