Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster)
Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.
As of May 20, 2015, Google rebranded Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console. In January 2018, Google introduced a new version of the Search Console, with a refreshed user interface and improvements.
Google Search Console Features
It has tools that let webmasters:
- Submit and check a sitemap and also helps the webmasters to check if there are any errors with their sitemap.
- Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about when Googlebot accesses a particular site.
- Write and check a robots.txt file to help discover pages that are blocked in robots.txt accidentally.
- List internal and external pages that link to the site.
- Get a list of links which Googlebot had difficulty crawling, including the error that Googlebot received when accessing the URLs in question.
- See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the click through rates of such listings. (Previously named ‘Search Queries’; rebranded May 20, 2015 to ‘Search Analytics’ with extended filter possibilities for devices, search types and date periods).
- Set a preferred domain (e.g. prefer example.com over www.example.com or vice versa), which determines how the site URL is displayed in SERPs.
- Highlight to Google Search elements of structured data which are used to enrich search hit entries (released in December 2012 as Google Data Highlighter).
- Receive notifications from Google for manual penalties.
- Provide access to an API to add, change and delete listings and list crawl errors.
- Rich Cards a new section added, for better mobile user experience.
- Check the security issues if there are any with the website. (Hacked Site or Malware Attacks)
- Add or remove the property owners and associates of the web property.
Google Features of Search Analytics reports
- Accurate data
- Search Analytics reports deliver more accurate reports than the Search Queries report.
- The reports are up-to-date and provides the latest information possible.
- Individual page count
- Search Analytic reports considers all the links to the same page as single impression.
- Separate reports are available to track the device type and search type.
- Image click count more accurate
- Search Analytics reports only count clicks as clicks on expanded images in an image search result to your page. The previous Search Queries report counts all the click on an images, expanded or not, in both web & images search.
- Data consolidated by full domain
- Search Analytics reports assign all clicks, impressions, and other search data to a single, complete host name.
- Subdomains are regarded as separate entities by Search Console and need to be added separately.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications. Google Analytics is a premium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the web. Google Analytics also provides an SDK that allows gathering usage data from iOS and Android Apps, known as Google Analytics for Mobile Apps.
Google Analytics Features
Integrated with Google AdWords, users can now review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. Google Analytics’ approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Google Analytics analysis can identify poorly performing pages with techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed on the website and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation. Google Analytics e-commerce reporting can track sales activity and performance. The e-commerce reports shows a site’s transactions, revenue, and many other commerce-related metrics.
On September 29, 2011, Google Analytics launched Real Time analytics, enabling a user to have insight about visitors currently on the site. A user can have 100 site profiles. Each profile generally corresponds to one website. It is limited to sites which have traffic of fewer than 5 million pageviews per month (roughly 2 pageviews per second) unless the site is linked to an AdWords campaign. Google Analytics includes Google Website Optimizer, rebranded as Google Analytics Content Experiments. Google Analytics’ Cohort analysis helps in understanding the behaviour of component groups of users apart from your user population. It is beneficial to marketers and analysts for successful implementation of a marketing strategy.
Google search console total clicks and total impressions
A link URL records an impression when it appears in a search result for a user. Whether or not the link must actually be scrolled into view or otherwise visible depends on the type of search element that contains the link, as described later.
For most result types, any click that sends the user to a page outside of Google Search is counted as a click, and clicking a link that stays inside search results is not counted as a click. See What is a query refinement? for more information.
Clicking a search result to an outside page, returning, then clicking the same link again counts as only one click. Clicking a different link counts as a click for each link clicked.
