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Most marketers and business owners use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track web traffic. But only the savviest ones know how to unlock their full potential. It all starts with understanding the differences and strengths of each tool.
Google Search Console mainly focuses on SEO and site performance, whereas Google Analytics is about overall web analytics. Both are indispensable for digital marketing, but in what ways exactly?
Keep reading to discover their differences and learn about their unique features to grow your website traffic! 😃👇
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free web service that offers various tools and reports on 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 essential 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 and web admins throughout the years, it has a much larger audience — hence the name change.
Google Search Console offers a suite of features to help users monitor and enhance their website's visibility and performance in Google search results:
Even if you are a beginner without SEO knowledge, you can log on to Google Search Console and pick out some valuable information immediately. It’s useful for anyone keen on monitoring a website’s performance on Google’s search engine results.
Google Search Console users include marketers, web developers, SEO specialists, business owners, and marketing agencies.
Learn more: How to Get Access to Google Search Console in 2024
Google Analytics (GA) is a web analytics tool that tracks and measures user interaction with your website at the granular level.
It collects a wide range of data, such as referral sources, bounce rate, geographic location of website visitors, session duration, and even the type of device used to access your website.
The latest iteration, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), launched in 2020, reigns supreme as the internet's most popular web analytics platform (did we already mention that it’s free, too?)
If your goal is to understand how visitors interact with and behave on your website, Google Analytics is the perfect platform for you.
Learn more: How to Create a Google Analytics Account in 2024
Google Analytics offers a range of features that can help users optimize their marketing efforts:
Google Analytics's users are similar to those of Google Search Console: SEO professionals, business owners, website owners, marketers, content creators, e-commerce businesses, and digital marketing agencies.
We’ll now explain how they differ and how best to use them to refine SEO strategies and drive business growth.
Learn more: How to Request Access to Google Analytics
New users can easily confuse Search Console and Analytics due to their similar names and shared Google origin. The slight overlap in data they provide can add to this confusion, making it difficult to differentiate their core purposes.
To avoid using the wrong tool for the job or under-utilizing their features, let’s take a look at their key differences:
Both provide valuable insights in their own ways.
Search Console: Primarily for monitoring and maintaining a website's presence in Google Search results. It helps website owners understand how Google views their site and identify issues impacting their search visibility.
Analytics: Focuses on understanding user behavior and interactions on your website.
Overall, Google Analytics collects more data than Google Search Console. This is because it is designed to offer a comprehensive view of user behavior on a website. In contrast, Search Console more narrowly focuses on search-related metrics.
Search Console: Offers a search engine-centric view of your site and keyword data.
Analytics: It provides a user-centric view of your site that is more focused on web events and audiences.
Can you spot the differences? One is narrowly designed around search, while the other centers on online user behavior.
Search Console:
Metric relevant to search rankings and performance in Google. Impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), average position in search results, crawl errors, index status, and security issues.
Analytics:
Metric relevant to audience insights and user behavior on your website. Page views, sessions, bounce rate, average session duration, traffic sources, conversions, goal completions, and user demographics.
NOTE: ‘Clicks’ are measured slightly differently in Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google Search Console counts multiple clicks on a link within the same browsing session. In contrast, Google Analytics only counts one click per session, making it more accurate for tracking unique user actions.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics have different reporting capabilities.
Search Console:
Analytics:
💡 It is also important to note here that Google Search Console does not include non-HTML views in the click count. In contrast, Google Analytics considers all types of views in its key metrics.
Search Console: Does not rely on JavaScript to function, so ad blockers are not a big deal.
Analytics: GA relies on JavaScript to function. This means that websites that don't have JavaScript or users who have disabled it in their browsers will impede the data collection process for GA.
Search Console: Actively monitors and reports security issues. It offers detailed reporting on crawl errors and a website's index status. Automatically filters out bot activity and creates specific reports on it.
Analytics: It has limited security monitoring, which is not its focus. It filters out bots to some extent (no detailed reports on it).
A query is a search or data-related request.
Search Console: GSC limits queries to 1,000 URLs daily. Data is typically updated every 24-48 hours. A query here refers to data on search queries in search engines.
Analytics: GA can report on an unlimited number of URLs. Data is updated often, almost in real-time. A query here refers to data requests on website traffic and user behavior.
Search Console: Provides a Page Experience report that evaluates factors such as Core Web Vitals, page load speed, visual stability, and mobile usability.
Analytics: Does not provide specific metrics on user experience.
Search Console: Offers limited customization options for reports and the dashboard. The reporting time zone is fixed at Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-07:00).
Analytics: Provides extensive customization options, allowing users to create tailored reports, layouts (views), widgets, and dashboards. Allows you to select any time zone in property settings.
GA has more integration options compared to GSC.
Search Console: It can be linked with Google Analytics to gain additional insights. Fewer integration options compared to GA.
Analytics: Can be integrated with various other Google products, such as Google Ads and Google Search Console, for a more holistic view of marketing performance.
💡 Pro tip: Integrating both tools with your Google Ads account gives you a comprehensive overview of your campaign performance, making it easier to identify areas for improvement. Use the combined insights on search queries, rankings, and audience demographics to fine-tune your targeting and messaging!
Great news!
Connecting Google Search Console and Google Analytics provides a powerful synergy, revealing a holistic picture of website performance and engagement.
Gain a 360-degree perspective by linking these tools to discover how search queries drive traffic and how users behave on your site.
Connecting the two is super simple:
Step 1: Log in to your Google Analytics Account
Step 2: Navigate to Admin
This can be found in 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! Before you begin, you must have a Google account and a valid domain.
Learn more: How to Create a Google Analytics Account
The answer is, why not both? Because each tool serves different purposes, using them together provides the most comprehensive understanding of your online presence.
Connecting Google Search Console to Google Analytics lets you see the whole picture, from how people find your site to what they do once they're there.
This unified view empowers you to make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategies.
The constant back-and-forth that comes with access requests is a painful part of onboarding with a digital marketing agency.
Here at Leadsie, we love to create products that can save you the headache of onboarding!
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!🤩
The client doesn’t even need to navigate Google Analytics or Google Search Console directly!
Here’s how it works:
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! 👇🥳
Nina is an SEO content writer who has a passion for helping SaaS businesses grow their organic traffic. She has produced web content in various niches, the most prominent being e-commerce, workflow automation, and marketing. When she’s not focused on making content that ranks, she loves to travel across the Mediterranean and come up with creative recipes to try out in the kitchen.
Clients struggling to share access to their
Google Search Console
accounts? Get the access you need in minutes with a free trial of Leadsie.
Approved by Meta, Google & Tiktok
Keep access to accounts if you cancel
Secure & 100% GDPR compliant
