What’s The Difference Between Google Analytics And Search Console?

As a company or a brand with a digital presence, you most likely have heard of Google Analytics and Google Search Console. When it comes to tools you want to have in your arsenal to ensure your website is working at top performance in terms of user experience, SEO, marketing operations, etc., these are amongst the top ones you will want to become familiar with and take advantage of.

While it’s easy to see why these two tools can be confused with each other, they offer very different functionalities, are in fact two separate programs and should be treated as such.

We will be taking a deeper look at both of these invaluable marketing and web performance tools, as well as discuss their differences. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a search-engine focused, free tool you can use to manage your site’s overall web performance. Search Console used to be known by the name Google Webmaster Tools, which made it appear to be a much more technically heavy program only the most digitally savvy web experts would be able to access and use. However, the Search Console as it is known today takes a very user-friendly approach and is intended to be easily used by people of all skill levels in digital marketing, whether you’re an SEO specialist, your site’s administrator or any other role in between. 

You can use insights from the program as well as information learned to enhance your site’s visibility in the SERPs, as well as manage how your website pages are showing up in the SERPs. A lot of these functionalities are extremely useful from an SEO standpoint to help ensure that your website is properly optimized and your content and web pages are performing well for you in the SERPs, so your audience can find your content and offerings and drive traffic to your site.

Below are examples of the kind of information you can obtain using Google Search Console:

• Find out how many impressions your site is generating
• Find out the indexing status of various pages
• Determine how certain pages are ranking and for which keywords
• See how many backlinks your site has 
• Submit a sitemap for your site to Google to ensure that the SERPs are properly crawling and indexing all of your site’s web pages
• See a list of errors or security issues on your site that need attention so you can remediate them

Google Analytics

If Google Search Console takes a more search-oriented approach offering you information in regards to your site’s performance, Google Analytics provides a wealth of information in regards to your site’s visitors and audience behavior and demographics. Also a free tool, you can use Google Analytics to track and monitor visitor behavior and activity on your site, discovering crucial information to inform strategic initiatives and  business decisions. If you are looking for a more broad overview of your website visitors’ behavior, you can review the dashboard and easily obtain this kind of information. However, you can also use the tool to do a much deeper dive into your audience behavior, accessing more granular views of in-depth data and information pertaining to your visitors. 

Let’s say for example, that you are running ads on Google as well as various social media platforms to potentially drive traffic to your site to generate revenue and profits. You can then connect these different platforms to your Google Analytics to track behavior of your site’s visitors from those platforms to your site. From this information, you can then determine how well certain platforms are working for in terms of bringing traffic to your site, as well as which of your ads and which kinds of ads are working most effectively for you. 

Google Analytics also offers essential information about your visitors you can use to make much-needed improvements to your site. You can use the tool to examine not only the bounce rates for various web pages, but identify exactly where on your site visitors are bouncing from, whether it’s on the home page, at some point of discovery or at the point of sales. You can then use this vital information to make adjustments to your site that will improve your site as well as its performance, from enhancing your visitors’ user experience to helping motivate potential customers to follow through with purchases to drive revenue and profits.

Here’s a rundown of the kinds of information you can glean from Google Analytics: 

• See the number of visitors landing on your site
• See the number of page views 
• Determine the number of pages visitors are looking at per session
• Find out how long a visitor’s session is 
• Determine bounce rate of certain webpages
• Find out demographic information of your visitors such as what city and state they live in, their age, gender, etc.

All in all, both Google Search Console and Google Analytics are must-have tools you should be using to elevate your digital marketing game and the performance of your website.

For even more digital marketing savvy, check out more articles by the team at Firon Marketing. And to ensure you are setting up your site for success, to facilitate your marketing endeavors at the highest potential and grow your company and site like never before, partner with us experts at Firon Marketing.