Connect Google Search Console with Google Data Studio

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Connect Google Search Console with Google Data Studio

I'm Brad Batesole and this week, we're looking at Google's Data Studio and it's integration with Google Search Console. Now, I've done a tip on Google's Data Studio in the past, but Google recently made the tool completely free, along with adding this new integration with Google Search Console. So, as a quick refresher, you'll find Google Data Studio at google.com/analytics/data-studio. Now, as a quick refresher, Data Studio allows you to build beautiful reports from multiple data sources, say from Analytics, AdWords, or Google Search Console, and then you turn that data into customizable reports that update dynamically and can be shared with others.

This is a great way to build out internal or client dashboards, especially because you can mix and match your data sources within a single report. This new integration with Google Search Console provides a fantastic way to report on your organic marketing efforts, alongside traditional data from say Google Analytics. I want to show you the quick highlights to get you started. So, first thing you can do is sign up for free in the upper right hand corner or sign in with your existing Google account. I've already done that.

And you'll arrive at this dashboard. Now, they'll have some sample reports for you to interact with, but in this case I'm going to start with a new report, so I'll choose this blank report in the upper left hand corner. Now, the idea is the first thing we have to do is add a data source and this data source is where we're going to get the information for our report. I'm going to select create new data source at the bottom of the screen. On the left hand side, I'll choose Search Console, and then you'll see a list of sites from Search Console or you'll need to approve Search Console linking to Data Studio.

I'll go ahead and select the site that I'm interested in linking and then we need to select if we're interested in site impressions or URL impressions. And if you're curious what the difference is, I've gone ahead and pulled up a support answer from Google that helps explain this. You see, in Google, let's say someone does a search for your pet store and they get three results. They see pet store/monkeys/ponies/unicorns. If you choose to aggregate your metrics by site, if I go back to the report, that would be site impression, what that's going to do is combine everything at the site level, ignoring that modifier at the end of the URL.

So, in this case, let's assume that a user clicks on all three of these results. You're going to see a click-through-rate of 100% because all of the clicks for the site will be combined and you're going to see an average position of one because it's going to pick the highest position from the results. So, in this case, monkeys was the highest position in rank number one, but let's say they also clicked on unicorns, it's not going to average them. It's going to pick one because that's the highest of the results. If you decide to aggregate the metrics by page, or in this case, URL, as it displays in this table view, you're going to see a little different data.

In this case, if a user clicks on all three, you're actually going to see a click-through-rate of 33% because it's going to show a click-through rate of one third to each page. And then it's going to average the position as two because one plus two plus three, divided by three, is an average of two. Now, what you want to see is really dependent on what you're going to be doing with this data. For starters, aggregating by page tends to be a little bit more realistic. So, you may want to start with that selection.

I'll choose URL and then connect in the upper right hand corner. From here, we can view the different fields that are coming in and the type of this field and the aggregation that's happening. If you're just getting started, you can simply choose add to report. Google has gone ahead and set the defaults for you. I'll choose add to report. And now, we've got this data source added, so it's time to start building a report. The first thing I recommend that you do is add a date range. You'll select the date range icon from the top and simply drag a box where you want that date range to appear.

This will allow you to interact with this report on a dynamic level. So, you can select the date range and all of the data you build out will change. Next, let's go ahead and add a time series. I'll select that. And I can draw where I want that graph to appear. And here on the right hand side, we can manipulate the data. So, the data source is our Search Console, the dimension is date, and the metric is click-through-rate. We could add a metric, clicks, or even impressions on top of that.

And I'll select back. You can also add a filter specific to this or you can use the filter for the date range that you've already selected. You can add in, say, a bar chart as well. You can go in, select perhaps the device category, or we can pick from that dimension, perhaps we're interested in the landing page, the query, and so forth, and what you'd like to compare that against, say clicks versus click-through-rate.

You can interact with a wide variety of different types of reporting. You can bring in scatter charts, bullet charts, area charts, text. The options are endless. What's exciting is that if you're already building these reports manually, you can come in and start to interact with this data. You can modify where it appears, the information you're showing, and you can also add additional data sources. So, you can bring in, say, Google Analytics and compare traffic to, say, click-through-rate. You also have the ability to modify the design.

You can control everything from the background image to the text. Once you're done and you want to test this out, I can turn off edit in the upper right hand corner and let's say we want to try this date picker. We'll go back to January 3rd to say January 24th and apply and you'll see that the data automatically updates and it shows you the information from that range. There's a ton that you can do with these reports. So, I encourage you to sign in and set up report. You can always continue to build on top of your reports as you learn what information is most important to you.

Thanks for checking in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you. So, follow me on Twitter @bradbatesole and let me know how you're using Google Data Studio.

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