GA4 vs Google Search Console
Google Analytics is one of the powerful tools. It helps you to analyze your data and gives you valuable information. It gives information about the audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversion. Whereas Google Search Console (alias Webmaster) helps us with SEO, Site’s Positioning, Organic Search traffic, SEO Queries, Impression, clicks, and more. You can also get information about, how Google is crawling your site and how it will review the site errors which may be interfering with indexing.
Now with the help of integration, Google Webmaster and Google Analytics data can be viewed, giving us some information and visibility side by side either its keywords or users’ behavior.
Google upgraded Google Search Console (Once known as Google Webmaster Tools) in May 2016.
Let us discuss more Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and how it is different from each other?
What is Google Webmaster or Google Search Console?
Google Search Console was previously known as Google Webmaster is a free tool provided by Google. It will let you know how Google looks at your website online. It helps to fix problems and offers a lot of other features with which you can use and improve the visibility of the sites.
What is the use of Google Webmaster Tools?
- It will help you to find any technical errors related to your website.
- It helps you check site health, whether any errors (if any) are appearing or not like
- 200 – the server successfully returned to the page
- 404 – requested page doesn’t exist
- 503 – the server is temporarily unavailable
- Google Webmaster Tools will keep your website updated and healthy, will keep the visitors coming back and eventually turning them into leads. with all this help you can identify the brand growth.
- It helps to analyze the organic (SEO) performance of the website.
- Google Webmaster Tools will analyze all broken links, duplicate titles, descriptions & links to your site, etc.
- It will check indexing status and optimize visibility of the site.
- Google webmaster will monitor and resolve all malware or spam issues that will keep your site clean.
- Google Webmaster Tools will monitor the search engine related information like search keywords, backlinks, crawl errors, CTR, impressions, ranking data, blocked URLs, HTML errors, etc.
Difference between Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
As a Digital Marketing Analyst or SEO Analyst, it is very important to know the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console (Google Webmaster tool).
The purpose of both the tools are different, as an analyst, you need to figure out which tool is best to use and when?
Let’s discuss in detail!!
GA4 Dashboard
- Google Analytics Audience Report
A) Demographics Report
Google Analytics will help you to find out how many males and females are coming to your website.
B) Geographical Location Website Visitors
Google Analytics will help you to know from which location users are visiting your site and you can target your audiences according to locations.
Other metrics you have to check are:
- Users
- New Users
- Avg. Session Duration
- Session and
- Bounce rate
C) New Visitor Vs Returning Visitors Report
Google Analytics New Visitor Vs Returning Visitors Report will help to identify whether users are really coming back for the second time to your website or not.
D) The time that your visitors spend on your site
This report will really help you understand your customer preferences for time and day. Use these data and target them wisely.
E) Is my Device User-Friendly?
The above report will help you to understand which devices your users are using to coming to the website and how user-friendly your website is.
- Google Analytics Acquisition Report
A) Channel Traffic
This report will help you to understand from which source/medium users are coming to my site and will let you know your daily, monthly, and yearly basis report.
- Google Analytics Behavior Report
A) Are my Keywords Performing?
The Keyword report will help (The above picture keywords are not mentioned) to find out which keyword is bringing most sales, brings more traffic to your website, keeps visitors on your website for longer durations, etc.
B) The most searched topic or Content
The above report will help you to analyze the top content of your page, which content brings more traffic, which content is not performing etc.
- Google Analytics Conversion Report
A) Set up your Goal to track your website
Setting up some goals will help to understand the conversion rate of the website.
Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tool)
1) Website Performance
The performance report gives an analysis of search results.
It is divided into 7 categories:
- Queries
- Pages
- Countries
- Devices
- Search Appearance
- Search Type
- And Dates
The above picture is an old version of the Google Search Console. If you are using the new version, you’ll find performance result in the performance tab. with the above data, you will able to find the top-performing pages, high CTR performance pages, clicks with keyword and how the number of impressions is doing.
2) Sitemap Report
You can view the sitemaps report in both the old and new versions of the Google Search Console.
When you have 10+ URL pages and 1 URL is not being indexed. Sitemaps Report will help to figure out the error and fix it.
3) HTML Errors Report
Google Search Console will help you to detect HTML errors of your website.
This report will display errors like duplicate titles or descriptions being too long. Overall it will help you understand how Google is viewing your content.
If errors are occurring to your blog, reduce the size of the meta title or description. Keep around 160 characters for descriptions and around 60 characters for titles. Check whether you have missed writing the meta title and descriptions and don’t forget to Fetch as Google to see the changes.
4) AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Report
AMP report helps you check the errors like page load time, mobile ranking, server performance, etc.
You will find the AMP report in both the old and new versions of Google Webmaster Tools. The below report is from the new version of Google Search Console.
5) Crawl Errors
Google Search Console will help you find out the pages which Google is unable to crawl. If there is an error in the crawling of the pages, your search engine visibility may go down.
This section is divided into two parts
- Site errors
- URL errors
Site errors will give the report all the errors from your website.
URL errors will give you errors from crawling pages on your desktop and Smartphones.
Some of the error names to be fixed are:
- 404 errors
- Soft 404 errors
- Server errors
- Domain Name System error etc.
6) Fetch as Google (Old) or URL Inspection (New Version)
Fetch as Google/URL Inspection is used to test how Google renders your site, how indexing is happening.
In the New version of the URL Inspection tool, you need to click on the URL Inspection bar and inspect your URL.
7) URL Parameters
Using URL Parameters you can manage the duplicate content and set preferences for Google on how you want each parameter type to be treated.
8) Remove URLs
Remove the URLs tool quickly help you to remove all the duplicate contents.
If you want to hide duplicate content from Google Searches, you can add the URL which is duplicate to Remove URLs tool and prior to 90 days it will automatically remove the content.
9) Blocked Resources
If your website has some content that you don’t want Google to access or any other search engines, use a robots.txt file to see how search engines should crawl your content.
10) Links to Your Site
The Links to Your Site report in Google webmaster tools gives you the report of what websites are linking. You have to always choose a high quality of content with picky backlinks so that the link should not bring any negative SEO issues.
11) Mobile Usability Report
Mobile Usability Report gives you an overview of design and development issues with mobile whether the mobile content is user-friendly or not?
If your mobile design is not compatible, it will increase the bounce rate and low traffic. Make sure that your content fits the screen size, good resolution and links and buttons are proper.
Conclusion
With the help of the above information, now you can better understand your users within the site and organic search. You can easily analyze and understand, which pages or content is important, and will give conversion rate as well you can fix all the issues.
You can integrate both Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and view all the data side by side; how landing pages, conversion rates, SEO performance, etc. are doing to come up with a better Digital Marketing Strategy.
Being an advertiser it is mandatory to follow Google’s procedure and guidance if you want to improve your search results. To grow your performance on Search Engine and start doing the best on the Google search platform, then you really have to play by their rules. You have to pay attention to their recommendations. Most important thing is to make your website fit their requirements and expectations. Join the eMarket Education digital marketing online course to learn how to use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to improve your Site.
Our most read blog on Top 10 GA4 Reporting For Digital Marketing Analysis
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