Last time I wrote about the awesomeness of Google Webmaster Tools and how the reports can help you fine tune your website and improve it’s performance. One of the things I mentioned was that it’s a great idea to connect your Webmaster Tools Account with your Analytics account and enable the Search Engine Optimization Reports.
If you did that, you may now be going crazy trying to reconcile the data between the two accounts. The data that’s displayed in Google Analytics doesn’t even remotely resemble what you’re seeing in Webmaster Tools.
Never fear, the data is the same. The reason the data is different (or appears to be different) between the two tools is because they have different default filters for the initial display.
Google Analyitics defaults to All search types: Image, Mobile, Web, and Video. Google Webmaster Tools defaults to Web searches only. It’s actually pretty cool, because with just a few clicks you can see the distribution of impressions based on the type of search.
You can apply new filters in a few easy steps:
- Click on “Filter” to open the window with the pie charts
- Click on “Web” to change the Filter
- Select the Filter you want to view (if you want it to match what you see in Google Analytics, select “All”)
- Click on Apply
Whala! Now you know how to make the data in Google Webmaster Tools match the data in Google Analytics. One other tip is to make sure that the data ranges match exactly otherwise you’ll see slightly different data.
The ability to discover and analyze search queries coming from mobile vs web is fantastic. You may discover that people use different keyword phrases depending on how they are searching.
If you see that you have a lot of impressions in image searches, you may want to take a look at how you’re naming your images. You want to make sure that people are finding you because of the great content you’re writing and not because of the pictures you’re using to make the pages pretty.
Hopefully this cleared up the mystery about why natural search data appeared to be different in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. If you’re looking for other tools for finding visitor data, Hotjar is an excellent compliment for these two Google tools.
Cheers!
I’am bit more familiar with google analytics. I have just embed webmaster tools too. In my experience webmaster tools is mainly focus on search engine, crawling, indexing etc. in pictorial view
nice great topic i like it
Hi Beth,
I’m really glad I found your blog, thanks for maintaining it. I have a question regarding Google Webmaster Tools. I notice that for the results for any period, it will say “X impressions” and then showing underneath it will say “showing Y”, where X is always more than Y, usually about double in my case.
Is there some reason Google won’t show us all of the impressions? Same circumstances, and same question, regarding clicks. And is there a place to find ALL of the impressions and clicks on Google Webmaster Tools?
Thanks so much!
Tim @ the Marietta Frame Shop