How To Add Search Console Data in GA4?

Adding Search Console data is important if you are running a GA4 account, and this is how to do it.

Video transcript:

David: So, if we want to add Search Console data within Google Analytics 4, we start by going to the admin. Pardon me. Okay. And from the admin, we can find product links at the bottom.

Tricia: Okay. Yeah.

David: Right. So, there are several product links. Some of these are more valuable to other people, but almost everybody needs search concepts. Let’s play with that one. We click on that. And if you don’t already have one, you can then add one by clicking the link button, choosing your Search Console property, and basically connecting it to…

Tricia: Yeah.

David: …your account. Okay. So now Google analytics is associated with Search Console. So, there’s a next step you need to take. And that is going to reports. And, you know, as just an overview, here are all the reports that are available to you. Your acquisition report, your engagement report, your monetization, demographics, and technology are all really nice important data, really similar to universal. But what we need is Search Console data. So, we go to the library at the bottom. This library feature is very important with the customization product. As we customize different reports, we might find them here. But what we really want to do is look for Search Console, which we see here. And we can then go and hit the three dots. Publish. And lo and behold now we have…

Tricia: Ah.

David: Search Console data in Google Analytics. Okay. That’s cool. That’s cool. But let’s look at it and see. That’s not what I want. I want this. Oh, there’s apparently a customized report I did. So, you were not going to see the website snapshot here. Ignore that.

Tricia: Okay.

David: Let’s just ignore that. You’re going to see queries and Google organic search traffic by default. I was playing with a customer report here. Alright. So, I don’t know how familiar you are with Search Console data and Google Analytics Universal. It does allow you to connect. And one of the problems is it doesn’t connect completely. So, that is limited, and that’s because this data is so valuable that Google doesn’t want to give it away. Lest we really, really manipulate search engines.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: But we can see some really cool things. For queries, we can see clicks or impressions, click-through rate, and average position. Right. So, we can sort. My average position. And we could find, oh here, we’re ranked third for Curious Ants. Right? We rank 3.49 for Google Search Console excluded pages, right? There’s interesting traffic from (this is positions) because that’s what we selected, but we can select clicks here. And that’s organic clicks over time. That’s trending a little bit down. That’s okay. This is an interesting report over here, which is clicks versus a position. So, you can compare, oh, here’s where I ranked versus where I’m getting clicks. It’s not a lot of data here, but it’s really cool. That’s cool. But this is actually where it gets really interesting. The search traffic page will show it by landing page.

Tricia: Ah.

David: And so, what it shows you is just like with queries – clicks, impressions, click-through rate position. But then connects data with Google Analytics data – users, engaged session, engagement rate, average time, event count, and conversion data, based on Google search traffic.

Tricia: Ah.

David: That’s something new in GA4. Okay. But I can get this data in Search Console, and there’s a lot more I can do with it in Search Console, so who cares?