Do you need Google Analytics for Search Console?

1. Go to Search Console

2. Click Start now, and then sign in with the email address linked to your Google Analytics account

3. Click Add Property, then add your site using domain or URL prefix

4. Verify that you own the site

You can do this in a few different ways:

• HTML file upload - Googles preferred method involves Google providing a file that you need to upload to your site. After doing this, you confirm the upload and verify your ownership. This is fairly straightforward but is a risk for those with multiple people accessing your site - for instance, a developer may accidentally delete this
• HTML tag - You place a Search Console-provided tag on your website. With this, Google can verify your ownership. Once again however, somebody could accidentally delete this
• Domain name provider - You choose your provider from a large dropdown menu. Dont know who this is? Google has advice on how to identify your domain host
• Google Analytics - Place your tracking code correctly with Edit permissions
• Google Tag Manager - You need to use the container snipper and have Manage permissions in Google Tag Manager. With this in place, click verify

Once all of these steps have been followed, your Search Console profile set-up will be complete.

1. Go to Google Analytics

2. Select Acquisition > Search Console

3. Click Set up Search Console data sharing

4. Choose your Search Console account

Once youve done this, your data sources will be connected. It may take a while for data to come through - especially if youve only just set up Search Console.

More charting timeframes

Although Search Console includes charts for viewing your data, these only show data on a daily level.

In Google Analytics, we can now view the same data in daily, weekly or monthly charts.

The option of weekly and monthly charts can make it much easier to analyse your data and spot patterns over longer timeframes. This is especially helpful when comparing data over different periods.

This view will show you standard Google Analytics engagement metrics for each of your pages such as Bounce Rate and Pages per sessions, as well as conversion data.

As we can see in the example below, if you have goal tracking set up on-site, you can also display the number of goal conversations for each individual page.

In this instance, weve chosen to order the data using conversions so that we can see the highest converting pages first. This helps to identify your most valuable pages. Clicking on the individual pages will now show the query view for that page.

Here we can see the impressions data showing the queries people are searching for the most that are relevant to our page. Alternatively, we can identify queries we might wish to optimize our page towards by sorting the data via Average Position.

Here, we can look for the queries that we already rank reasonably well for that also have the highest level of impressions. These terms are likely to provide the easiest wins if we can improve rankings towards the top 3 positions on Google and so become priorities for optimization.

Viewing this in Analytics, rather than Search Console, enables us to spot differences in engagement across different device types.

This becomes more useful when we click through to the individual device reports.

We can now look at engagement metrics for different devices at a page by page level.

Desktop Report

Mobile Report

We can use these reports to look for inconsistencies in the way pages perform across different devices. For example, we can see from the above examples that conversion rates are much lower on mobile. However, bounce rates are also lower. This suggests that although mobile users are happy enough with the mobile design, we might want to look at how we can improve calls to action on mobile pages.

We can also identify issues with individual pages. From this example, we can see that the page /en-gb/training has a much lower bounce rate (18.26%) on desktop than it does on mobile (35.52%). We would definitely want to review the design of this page on mobile to consider how we could increase engagement rates.