The Difference Between Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Last updated: March 23, 2020

Google Analytics and Search Console do not treat information in the exact same ways, so even if you think you are looking at the same report, you might not be getting the exact same information in both places. We have a look at the differences here.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that every serious website owner should have and understand how to use. It allows you to track a vast range of data concerning your site performance, traffic, and even user behaviour. It has the power to totally transform your online marketing strategy and all you need is a Google account to get you started.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a collection of tools and resources offered by Google that allows you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site, and identify which keyword queries your site is appearing for in search results. Search Console is used to understand and improve how Google sees and ranks your site.

Google Analytics and Search Console do not treat some information in the exact same ways, so even if you think you're looking at the same report, you might not be getting the exact same information in both places. To get the most out of the information you can link the accounts. Using these two tools linked will integrate the data from both sources to provide you with additional reports.

1. Google Analytics Reports

These reports make up the core of marketing funnels, and tracking and measuring these are vital. Google Analytics allows you to easily capture all the data so you are able to see which of your marketing efforts are working and which don't. When you have such easily accessible digital analytics, you can make better-informed business decisions.

The information captured by Google Analytics is conveniently made available in reports that you can find within the user interface. You can then analyse these reports to better understand your customers as they enter your marketing funnel and move along the customer journey. This will ultimately help you form the best strategic decisions for your business.

Realtime report

These reports will provide you with detailed information about who is currently using your website. You will see how many people are using your site, what pages they are viewing when they are viewing from, and what they are using to view your site.

Audience Reports

These reports will provide you with detailed information about who your visitors are. In them, you will find detailed reports for your visitors' demographic (age and gender), what their general interests are, where they come from and what language they speak, how often they visit your website (Behaviour), and the technology they use to view your website.

Acquisition Reports

These reports will provide you with detailed information about what lead your visitors to your website. You will see your traffic broken down by main categories and specific sources such as organic traffic. You can also connect Google Analytics to AdWords to learn more about PPC campaigns and to Google Search Console to learn more about search traffic.

Behaviour Reports

These reports will provide you with detailed information about your content. Particularly, the top pages on your website based on traffic, as well as the number of repeated views from a single person (pageviews), unique pageviews, average time on page, the top entry pages on your website (landing pages), bounce rate and percentage of users who exit from a page. You can also check the site speed as well as find specific suggestions from Google on how to make your website faster.

Conversions Reports

If you set up Goals within your Google Analytics, you can see how many conversions your website has received and what URLs they happened upon. You can also see what path a visitors took to complete the conversion. Most of Google Analytics standard reports will tie specific data to your conversions.

For example, you can see the number of conversions made by visitors from California in the Audience report. You can see the number of conversions made by visitors from Facebook in the Acquisitions report. You can see the number of conversions made by visitors who landed on specific pages in the Behaviour report. Also read our Google Analytics secrets.

2. Google Search Console Reports

Performance Report

The Performance report displays important information about how your site performs in Google Search results, how many people click on your site, how often it comes up in a search, the average position in search, what queries showed your site in Search and any special features (such as rich results) associated with your results. This helps you to see how your search traffic changes over time and what search queries are most likely to show your site.

URL Inspection Tool

The URL Inspection tool shows the information that the Google index has about the current index status of a URL on your site, or test a live page. The Information provided is quite extensive and allows you to request that an URL be crawled (or recrawled) by Google. This includes errors encountered when rendering the page, the pages HTML code and errors, JavaScript output, AMP/mobile usability errors and code, and, any canonicals selected for a page, and more.

Coverage Report

The Coverage Report shows the indexing state of all URLs that Google has visited, or tried to visit, on your website. The summary page will group the results for all URLs by indexation Errors, Warnings (or Valid with Warnings), Valid, or Excluded from Google’s index. To use this properly you should scan for spikes in errors, or drops in indexed counts to identify crawling problems on your site.

Sitemap Report

The Sitemaps report informs Google bots about any new sitemaps you have submitted for your site, it displays sitemap statistics and indicates any errors Google encountered when processing your sitemaps.

Speed report

The Speed report tests how fast your pages perform according to real-world usage data. This becomes important when you take bounce rate into account. For example, if page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%. If it jumps 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 106%. The slow page speed may also be demoted in Google Search results.

Link reports

The link report shows which sites are linked to yours, what the link text is, and internal link targets within your site. This can be used to determine if you are linked to by either spammy or useful sites.