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 also brings your spend in, so the Attribution report can show 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 your spend, cost per click and cost per 1,000 impressions appear in the Attribution report. After your first 15 days, you also see what each Focused visitor really costs. 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 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 in Bread & Butter, and the Google Ads card 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 visitor journeys, in the Attribution report, in the Journey Summary and in the Intelligence Brief. Past visits are resolved too, not only new ones. If you rename a campaign in Google Ads, Bread & Butter shows the new name.
Your spend in the Attribution report. Spend, cost per click (CPC) and cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) appear 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. 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 of calibration are over. See What is the Focused CPM?
Scale, Watch or Investigate. Campaigns and keywords are ranked against each other and marked Scale, Watch or Investigate. 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 UTMs still matter. Connecting doesn't replace your tracking template. It makes the IDs in it readable. Set it up once using 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 Le Chat: what each campaign and keyword costs per Focused visitor, with a Scale, Watch or Investigate verdict on each. You can also ask your own questions, such as "Which keywords bring Focused visitors who never come back?" See 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 and spend stop coming in.
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 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} .
Why Google Ads and Bread & Butter count differently
Google counts its own conversion actions. Bread & Butter counts Engaged Leads, people who gave you a verified email address. The gap between the two is useful: it shows which campaigns Google credits with conversions that never became real leads.