Google Analytics vs. Google Search Console
Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the two main sources of information that can help you gauge your website’s performance in the search engines and determine what needs to be fixed. If you use only one of these tools, you’re losing out on valuable information! Here’s how to decide which one you should use and how to integrate data from both of them into your existing analytics setup.
Google Analytics
Among the most popular tools for marketers, Google Analytics gives site owners a vivid snapshot of traffic statistics. Highlighting primarily how web users interact with your site, Google Analytics provides stats like total site visits, bounce rate, average time on marketing site, and even demographic information for members of your audience. In addition, Google Analytics offers benefits for marketers running active campaigns, such as Google Ads.
The primary focus of Google Analytics is to interpret and process website usage data, identifying trends and opportunities you can leverage to increase traffic, and boost your web presence.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a tool for webmasters that promotes success in search results. With a focus on clicks/ impressions, users are able to study things like click-through rates, search queries, crawl errors, links from outside websites, and HTML errors. These metrics have little to do with who actually visits your site; they’re related to the ways your site appears to those searching keywords and phrases, making the options available valuable for SEO marketers and web developers.
Unlike Google Analytics, that presents flexible and customizable data in an easily-managed form, Google Search Console offers suggestions for approval, highlighting problem areas and opportunities for improvement.
Google Analytics provides information:
- The number of site visitors
- Where visitors are coming from
- Their time spent on the site
- The reason for their visit
- Bounce rate
- Customer acquisition
Google Analytics collects this data from:
- User’s HTTP request
- Browser/system information
- First-party cookies
On the other hand, Google Search Console is used to improve and optimize your marketing website.
Google Search Console provides information such as:
- Who’s linking to your site
- Any technical site errors
- Intel to keyword queries
- Click-through rate and other metrics
- User clicks and impressions
How long does Google Search Console keep data?
Up to 90 days of historical data is kept in your GSC. After that, it’s gone. If you’re looking for longer term performance metrics, use GA (Google Analytics). With GA, you can go back as far as you want with reports and segmentation. You also have access to a much more robust set of tools and features than what’s available through GSC. What does Google Search Console do?:
The Search Console helps you understand how users interact with your digital site by giving you a comprehensive view of organic search activity. The real-time data helps you track traffic sources, identify trends over time, optimize titles and meta descriptions, find new keywords to target on-page, troubleshoot technical issues on your site (e.g., crawl errors), and identify links pointing to your site. It’s basically an analytics tool but focused on SEO instead of conversions or user behavior like funnel analysis or heatmaps.
Search Console vs. Analytics: Which tool should you use?
The answer is easy: Both. This isn’t an either/or situation — the two tools focus on altogether different areas, and since they’re both free, it’s not even as though you have to make room for both of them in your budget. There’s honestly no reason not to make use of both digital tools.
Even better, you can actually link the two tools together via your Google account. That helps them sync with each other and share valuable information to make them both more useful to you.
The bottom line is that you should use Google Search Console to fuel your SEO efforts, and Google Analytics to boost your web design.