The ultimate digital duel 🫣: Google Search Console (GSC) clashes with Google Analytics (GA) in 10 key differences!
Both indispensable tools for digital marketing, they play a crucial role in understanding user behavior and search performance.
Google Search Console mainly focuses on SEO and site performance, whereas Google Analytics is all about the overall web analytics.
Whether you are a digital marketing agency who needs access to your client's accounts in these essential tools or a website owner eager to optimize their site, this article is tailor-made for you!
Keep reading to discover which tool (or perhaps both!) will best compliment your marketing efforts!😃👇
Overview: What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free web service with a variety of tools and reports that offer insights into how search engines interact with a website.
While it can’t compensate for poor marketing, it does reveal how Google crawls, indexes, and serves your website to users.
Understanding how a site is doing on Google is important for identifying areas of improvement and attracting more relevant search traffic.
Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, the popular product was rebranded as Google Search Console in 2015.
While the tool has proven invaluable to webmasters throughout the years, it has a much larger audience — hence the change of name.
From SEO professionals to website owners and marketers, Google Search Console is useful for anyone keen on monitoring a website’s performance on Google’s search engine results.
Google Search Console: Key Features
Search Console comes with several features that can help you monitor, optimize, and enhance a site’s performance in Google’s search results:
Performance reports
Located in the Performance tab, this functionality allows Google Search Console to report data on:
- Total clicks (how often visitors click on your site),
- Total impressions (how often website visitors see your site on search engine results pages),
- Average CTR (% of impressions that generated a click)
- Average position of a website in search results.
Index coverage reporting
This includes an overview of the indexing status of a website’s URLs, highlighting technical SEO issues that can exclude a page from the search results.
Performance experience reports
Found under the Performance Experience tab, Google Search Console can monitor search performance trends by queries, countries, pages, and other filters.
Sitemap submission
In Search Console→Sitemaps, users can submit their sitemaps in order to help Google’s crawlers understand a website’s structure and get it indexed quicker.
Crawl stats reports
This report shows statistics about Google’s crawling history on a website; something that is particularly useful for advanced users with >1000 pages.
Security monitoring
Located in the Security Issues tab, this feature notifies users of possible security concerns on their website.
Links reports
Google Search Console makes it easy to track internal and external links (backlinks) to a website. There, you can see who links to you the most and your top-linked pages.
Google Search Console: Who Is It For?
As discussed earlier, Google Search Console is designed for a diverse audience:
SEO Specialists
It is a no brainer that those engaged in search engine optimization will absolutely love Google Search Console!
Search Console is a must for any SEO expert, as the tool can simplify workflow by helping you monitor a website’s organic traffic and make informed decisions about future steps to increase visibility in search results.
Business Owners
Website owners can benefit from Google Search Console by getting insights into their site’s performance.
Even if you don’t want to utilize Search Console directly, becoming familiar with basic SEO search analytics will help you understand how organic search works.
Digital Marketing Agencies
Similar to SEO professionals, digital marketing agencies can use the features and reports of Google Search Console to refine their marketing strategies and impress their clients.
Overview: What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that allows users to understand website performance through the impressive tracking and analysis of user behavior.
The extensive data collection seamlessly provides users with insights into the origin of organic traffic, the geographic location of website visitors, and even the type of device they have used.
The ultimate goal of using Google Analytics is to understand how people behave on your website and leverage this to continually enhance user experience.
The current version of the tool, also known as Google Analytics 4 or GA4, was introduced in 2020 and has taken off ever since!
In fact, it is the most used web analytics platform on the internet!
If your goal is to understand how visitors interact with your website, Google Analytics is the perfect platform for you.
Google Analytics: Key Features
Google Analytics offers a range of features that can help users optimize their marketing efforts:
Audience insights
Google Analytics can track up to 200 metrics. Some of those include:
- Page views (total number of pages viewed)
- Percentage of new sessions (% of first-time website visits)
- Average session duration (how long a visitor stays on the website)
- Goal completion (number of times a visitor completed a desirable action)
Custom reports
Google Analytics lets users create customized reports for each marketing channel to focus on metrics tailored to specific marketing campaigns.
Visualization
The visualization feature of Google Analytics enhances the presentation of data by transforming it into actionable insights that can help users identify trends.
Smart goals
This tool is designed to help you set specific goals and track their progress. With Google’s machine learning algorithm, it can identify and suggest goals that are likely to increase organic traffic and user engagement.
Customer lifecycle reporting
Google Analytics can present data in accordance to the distinct stages of customers’ journeys- from acquisition, to conversion, and retention.
Google Analytics: Who Is It For?
Similar to Google Search Console, Google Analytics is a tool that caters to a diverse audience.
However, marketing agencies might find it particularly handy!
SEO Specialists
By analyzing user interactions with specific pages, SEO professionals can identify opportunities to enhance organic search visibility.
Business Owners
Website owners can use Google Analytics to identify popular content and optimize their website for better user experience.
Digital Marketing Agencies
Marketing agencies will benefit from the popular web analytics platform, as they can leverage Google Analytics to generate comprehensive reports on the effectiveness of their campaigns and valuable insights on user engagement.
What Are The Differences Between Google Search Console And Google Analytics?
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are both free essential tools for analyzing a website’s performance.
Despite this, they serve distinct purposes.
Google Search Console focuses on data before a visitor reaches the website while Google Analytics provides insights into user behavior after they have landed on it.
This means that comparing Google Search Console with Google Analytics becomes necessary!
So, let’s take a look at some of the key differences:
#1 Metrics
NOTE: ‘Clicks’ are measured slightly differently in Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Google Search Console registers a new ‘click’ even if it occurs multiple times within the same browsing session.
In comparison, Google Analytics registers only one click per session, which means that no matter how many times you click on a link, this tool would count it as one- making it a better platform for isolating the actions of users.
It is also important to note here that Google Search Console does not include non-HTML views in the click count, whereas Google Analytics considers all types of views in its key metrics.
Overall, Google Analytics collects more metrics compared to Google Search Console.
This is because it is designed to offer a comprehensive view of user behavior on a website, whereas Search Console more narrowly focuses on search-related metrics.
#2 Reporting Capabilities
Google Search Console and Google Analytics have different reporting capabilities:
#3 Ad Blockers and JavaScript
#4 Security and Errors
#5 Video Data
While both tools provide data on video content, there are some notable differences in their approach:
#6 Cost
Although both Google products are completely free, there are some key differences in their pricing:
#7 Reporting Time Zones
#8 Query Limitations
A query is a search or data related request. Both platforms have their own query limitations:
#9 Customization
#10 Integrations
Seamlessly integrating both tools with other products ensures a smooth and effortless exchange of data across platforms, making the process of data sharing exceptionally easy:
TIP: Integrating both the tools with your Google Ads account is a great way to monitor and optimize your marketing campaign to encourage customer conversion and retention.
By analyzing data from multiple sources in one place you can get unified reporting that simplifies this part of your workflow.
Plus, you will get much more detailed data on search queries, search rankings, and audience demographics!
Can I Integrate Google Search Console With Google Analytics?
Great news!
Both tools can be integrated with each other to enhance the potential to boost your search traffic, creating a more efficient and effective strategy.
With a unified data analysis, you can get the best of both worlds- establishing a valuable correlation between search rankings and user behavior data.
While each Google product focuses on different aspects of website performance, integrating them together means that you can get a complete understanding of your website’s overall effectiveness on the same page.
Connecting the two is super simple:
Step 1: Login to your Google Analytics Account
Step 2: Navigate to Admin
This can be found on the bottom left corner of the sidebar
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Step 3: Select Product Links→ Search Console Links
Step 4: Type in the name of the account you want to connect to in the search bar and click Link
Step 5: Tick the box for the property you want to add, click on Confirm
Step 6: Select the web data stream associated with your site:
Step 7: Click Next
Step 8: Submit your updated settings! All done!
NOTE: If you don’t already have a Google Search Console and Google Analytics account, setting them up should only take a few minutes of your time!
Just make sure that you have a Google account and a valid domain before you begin, as these are required.
Find out more: How to Create a Google Analytics Account
Managing Access Requests to Google Search Console and Google Analytics
The constant back-and-forth that comes with access requests is a painful part of onboarding with a digital marketing agency.
What if we told you that quick, stress-free access is indeed possible?
This is why we created Leadsie.
With our magic link, getting access to either tool can be done in just a few clicks!🤩
Find out more: How to Give And Request Access to Google Analytics
The client doesn’t even need to navigate Google Analytics or Google Search Console directly!
Here’s how it works:
Google Search Console or Google Analytics? Why Not Both?
Google Search Console provides a gateway to the inner workings of Google’s search algorithms, making it a great tool for creating effective SEO strategies.
On the other hand, Google Analytics is the best tool on the market for understanding website traffic and user behavior.
So why not connect Google Search Console to one of the greatest analytics tools the internet has to provide?
Here at Leadsie, we love to create products that can save you the headache of onboarding!
Leadsie is the easiest way for agencies to get access to your marketing accounts and can easily be integrated with both platforms; making it the perfect tool to complement the benefits of Search Console and Analytics!
Get started using Leadsie today with our 14-day FREE trial.
Just enter your email below! 👇🥳
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