Linking Analytics to Search Console

Two halves of the same journey

Analytics begins recording when somebody arrives on your site and describes everything after that.

Search Console describes everything before: what was typed, where you appeared, and how often somebody chose you over the results around you.

Separately, each is missing the half that makes it actionable.

Analytics tells you a page produced enquiries without saying what those people were looking for. Search Console tells you a query brings clicks without saying whether any of them did anything.

Linking the two puts both halves in one report, which is a ten-minute job most small businesses have never done.

What the link gives you

• The queries that brought people to a page.
• Impressions alongside visits.
• Click-through rate per query and page.
• Average position for each.
• What those visitors did after arriving.

The last is the one that is otherwise unavailable, and it is the point of the exercise: connecting a search term to an outcome rather than to a click.

The questions it answers

Three that a small business genuinely has.

Which searches produce enquiries rather than merely visits, which frequently turns out to be a different list from the one bringing the most traffic.

Whether a page is being found for what you intended, or for something adjacent that explains why visitors leave immediately.

And where you are appearing often and being chosen rarely, which points at a title or description that is not doing its job rather than at a ranking problem.

That third one is the cheapest win available in search, because rewriting a title is minutes and improving a position is months.

Setting it up

Ten minutes, and the prerequisites are the part that trips people up.

You need administrative access to both, and the Search Console property has to be verified for the same site.

In analytics, the link is under the administration section alongside the other product links, where you select the Search Console property and the data stream to associate it with.

The step people miss is that the reports do not appear automatically afterwards. The relevant reports have to be published to your report collection before they show up in the navigation.

That is a separate action in the library section, and without it the link is active and invisible.

Data also takes a day or two to appear, so an empty report immediately afterwards is not a fault.

A worked example

A business linked the two and looked at which queries produced conversions rather than clicks.

Their highest-traffic query was a general one about their trade in their city, which brought a substantial number of visitors and had produced two conversions in three months.

A much smaller query, naming a specific service and a suburb, had produced eleven from a fraction of the traffic.

They had been writing content aimed at the first for two years.

They also found a page appearing frequently for a relevant search with a very low click-through rate, and its title turned out to be the platform default rather than anything descriptive.

Rewriting that one title produced more additional visits over the following two months than any content they had published that year.

Read the position figure carefully

A caution, since average position is the number people fixate on.

It is an average across every impression, including searches from other cities, on other devices, and in contexts that will never produce a customer.

A local business can have a mediocre average position and be first for everybody who matters, because the average is dragged down by irrelevant geography.

Which makes movement in average position a weak signal on its own.

Look at clicks and conversions by query instead, and treat position as context rather than as a measurement of anything.

Queries are not complete

Worth knowing so the report is not over-read.

Search Console withholds queries that are rare enough to identify individuals, so the list you see is a subset rather than everything.

For a small business that subset can be a modest share of total clicks, with the remainder unattributed.

Which means the report is directional rather than exhaustive, and a query not appearing does not mean nobody searched it.

Use it to find patterns and opportunities, not to build a complete picture, and do not attempt to reconcile the totals against your analytics figures, which count different things.

Link the advertising account too

While you are in the same section, since it is the same kind of join.

If you run paid advertising, linking that account brings campaign data into the same reports, so paid and organic sit side by side.

That makes the comparison possible: what a visitor from an advertisement does compared with one from a search result, and what each costs.

It is the same ten minutes and the same administrative requirement.

For a business spending anything on advertising, that comparison is more useful than either set of figures alone.

Search Console is worth having anyway

Worth stating, since the link presupposes it and a surprising number of small businesses have never set it up at all.

On its own it reports which pages are indexed, which are not and why, whether anything is blocked, and any problems found while crawling.

Those are the questions behind several of the technical faults worth knowing about, and none of them is visible in analytics.

Verification takes a few minutes, usually by adding a record to your domain or a file to your site, and the data begins accumulating from that day.

If you do nothing else from this article, set that up, since the linking is a refinement and the tool itself is the foundation.

The counter-case

The link is useful and not transformative.

A business with very low traffic will find most queries withheld and the reports thin, in which case Search Console on its own answers the same questions with less setup.

There is also a risk of the join encouraging a focus on search terms at the expense of the offer, since query data is interesting and interesting is not the same as important.

And none of it captures the customer who searched, saw you, and telephoned two days later from memory, which for many local businesses is a large share of what happens.

Link it, look for the low click-through pages, act on those, and go back to work.

The ten minutes

1. Confirm administrative access to both.
2. Create the link in the administration section.
3. Publish the reports to your collection.
4. Wait a couple of days for data.
5. Look at conversions by query, not clicks.
6. Find pages with impressions and low clicks.
7. Rewrite those titles first.

Step three is why most people believe the link failed, since the reports are not added to the navigation automatically.

Reacting to search news sensibly is covered in the update that did not affect you.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.