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Google has made it easier for Website owners to see how their sites are faring in organic search results by more tightly integrating Search Console metrics with Google Analytics metrics.
The integration will allow site owners to combine data from both sources more easily to get a holistic view of the factors affecting their Website’s performance on Google search, Joan Arensman, product manager, and Daniel Waisberg, analytics advocate, posted on the company’s Analytics Solutions blog this week.
From a single report, users will not only be able to see how visitors arrived at their site but what they did once they got there. Up to now, Website owners who wanted to link reports from the two apps had to first configure Search Console for data sharing with Google Analytics. And they could only view search statistics in isolation of the other data in the analytics component.
The latest update gives Website owners a way to combine data from both sources into a single report at the landing-page level, Arensman and Waisberg wrote. Doing so gives administrators quick access to a broad range of metrics related to acquisition, user behavior and conversion rates for traffic generated from organic search, the two Google managers said.
Users can get unique insights from their ability to combine data such as those related to page impressions and average search ranking with data, including how many visitors leave after viewing just one page and the number of pages per session the average user visits, according to Arensman and Waisberg.
As one example, they said, site owners would now be able to zero-in quickly on landing pages that are attracting a lot of visitors via organic Google Search but are then failing to engage them. By learning about the problem, site owners have an opportunity to improve their landing pages so visitors engage with the pages in a more meaningful way.
Similarly, the data could help users identify landing pages with high user engagement metrics but not nearly enough traffic suggesting a need for improved page titles and descriptions. Or it could help Web owners identify queries that are working well in attracting people to a landing page or drill into how their site fares in search conducted on different devices like desktop, smartphones and tablet computers.
There are some caveats, though. Not all features supported in Google Analytics will be available for Search Console data. One example is segmentation. Though this week’s integration combines two data sources, users will still be able to do segment analysis—or examine subsets of data at a time—only on data in Google Analytics.
Users commenting on Google’s blog appeared generally enthusiastic about the update with many saying it was about time for such an integrated view to become available. A few wanted more.
“Honestly about time,” poster Micah Fisher-Kirshner said responding to Google’s announcement in the Analytics Solutions blog. “Sadly it’s only at the landing-page level and it’s not heavily segment-able, but it’s a true start in integrating the data from Search Console into Analytics.”
Google will roll the update out to users over the next several weeks; so not everyone will see it immediately, Arensman and Waisberg wrote.