Many people assume Google Ads and Google Analytics come as a pair, and that if you want to run one you must install the other. They are separate tools, and plenty of businesses measure their ads perfectly well without Google Analytics.

What matters is knowing what you can still measure and what you give up.

The short answer: you can see paid visits and goal conversions by source and campaign using any analytics tool that understands ad click tags. What you cannot do is send conversions back to Google Ads for automated bidding, or build remarketing audiences, without Google's own tags.

What each tool does

Google Ads buys the clicks. It shows your spend, impressions and clicks.
Analytics shows what visitors do once they arrive: which pages they view, where they came from and whether they take an action you care about.

Google Analytics is one analytics tool. Others, including privacy-friendly ones, can do the second job without Google's.

How to measure Google Ads in another analytics tool

Turn on auto-tagging in Google Ads, or add UTM parameters to your ads' final URLs. Both tell your analytics tool that a visit came from a paid click.
Add UTM parameters if you want campaign detail. Auto-tagging alone usually identifies a visit as paid search but does not fill in campaign, content or keyword reports. UTM parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) do.
Set up goals for the actions that matter, such as a form submission, a phone-number click or a purchase confirmation page.
Read the results by source and campaign. You can then see which campaigns bring visitors and which ones convert.

What you give up

Be honest about the trade-off:

No conversion import into Google Ads. If you rely on automated bidding that learns from conversions imported from your analytics tool, you will still need Google's own conversion tag.
No remarketing audiences. Building audiences of past visitors needs Google's tags.
Spend stays in Google Ads. Clicks, impressions and cost live in Google Ads. You compare them with visits and conversions side by side rather than in one report.

For many small advertisers, none of these matter. If you are mainly asking "which campaigns bring enquiries?", visits and goal conversions by campaign answer it.

What about cookie consent?

Privacy-friendly analytics that do not use cookies do not need a consent banner. We explain why in our guide to cookie consent banners for analytics in the UK.

That only covers the analytics tool. Google's own advertising tags, such as conversion tracking and remarketing, are separate: they can set cookies and have their own consent requirements. If you add them, check what applies to your visitors first. This is general information, not legal advice.

Who this suits

It suits you if:

you want to know which campaigns bring visits and enquiries,
you would rather not run a consent banner just for analytics,
your bidding does not depend on imported conversions or remarketing.

It does not suit you if your ad strategy depends on smart bidding trained on imported conversions, or on remarketing audiences. In that case you will need Google's tags alongside whatever else you use.

Do not forget the landing page

Paid clicks are the most expensive visitors you will ever get. If they land on a slow page, you pay for clicks that never turn into enquiries. It is worth checking how your landing pages perform for real visitors, especially on mobile. Our guide to Core Web Vitals explains the metrics in plain English.

How Web Vitals Collector helps

Web Vitals Collector shows paid visits and goal conversions by source and campaign in your dashboard, with no cookie banner needed for our analytics. Because it also measures page speed for real visitors, the weekly report can point out when a busy page, such as a campaign landing page, is also a slow one. See how it compares in our comparison with Google Analytics, or read the short answer in our FAQ.

This article is general information, not legal or advertising advice. Analytics and PageSpeed results are automated estimates.