What Are Google Search Console Insights?

Google Search Console Insights represents an experience which makes available both tailored GA (Google Analytics) and GSC (Google Search Console) data to website owners and content creators. While this is a very useful tool, it’s important to understand the importance and relevance of Google Search Console Insights so that you can make the best use of them.

Should Search Console Insights Show Google Analytics Data?

If Google Analytics is properly associated to Google Search Console, users can enjoy better access to a wider variety of insights that can assist in achieving a greater understanding of content performance. If no association is created, however, access is only given to the Google Search Card.

If Google Analytics data isn’t appearing on Google Search Console Insights there are three potential causes:

• The GSC property hasn’t been associated with a Google Analytics property. This is particularly the case of there are separate properties for HTTPS and HTTP traffic on Google Search Console. Therefore, properties that receive most traffic must be associated, or a domain property must be verified to include all traffic in a single location.
• There is a lack of appropriate permissions on Google Analytics. Checking that you’ve Read & Analysed permissions to that GA property should resolve this issue.
• The incorrect GA view has been selected in Google Search Console. GA data is brought to GSC Insights for one specific GA view under an associated property, so if no views are under that property populating data is impossible. The view can be seen and changed in the Associations page of the Search Console.

Why Is the Google Search Console Insights Data Different To That In Google Analytics?

GSC and GA data differs in a number of ways. This is because one represents Google Search activity while the other is representative of user behaviour on the website.

GSC Insights uses Google Analytics page title dimension which may include a number of URLs. GSC Insights will only extract the canonical URL that is most prominent when fetching Search data.

GSC Insights will also only show Google Analytics data for the previous 28 day period. Since GSC and GA’s time ranges differ, checking to ensure the dates are identical when making comparisons is key.

Furthermore, GA metrics are combined in GSC with Search metrics and these represent a number of elements of your website which are all calculated differently.

How Is New Content Chosen By Search Console?

The card labelled “new content” reveals pages on your website which received their first page views over the past 28 days. Each title may also have indicated its most prominent canonical URL’s top search queries. All content is sorted by its recency and several views must have taken place for it to appear.

Search Console chooses new content by first checking any page title that received no traffic in the previous year but did receive traffic during the past 28 days. The data is then cleaned and pages that are unlikely to represent new content will be filtered out as well as content translations.

If new content isn’t reported, that doesn’t necessarily mean that is hasn’t been indexed or has had no Google Analytics traffic. New content doesn’t depend on its content having been indexed or crawled either.

Page titles that have received the most views over the past 28 days are listed on as most popular content. Every title may also have indicated its leading canonical URL’s top search queries.

How Are Referring Links From Other Websites Chosen?

This card reveals how users find the content on your site via links from other websites. The point of this report is to give site owners an idea of how many entrances have been generated by specific referring pages. Google Analytics includes every page view within the current session but GSC Insights only counts one page view for every incoming session from specific referrals.

Why Are Clicks Lower Than Page Views On The Google Search Card?

If the number of page views is higher than the number of clicks there are three reasons that could be the cause:

• It’s possible that every click triggers multiple page views. The other page views in the sessions will be attributed also to Google/Organic.
• Google Analytics page views for Google/Organic will include more surfaces when compared to web search results, like Video Search, Image Search and Discover.
• GSC and GA won’t always report on the same page groups. As an example, the GSC account may only include HTTP pages, but the Google Analytics view could be showing both HTTPS and HTTP pages.

What Do Different GSC Insights Card Badges Mean?

Badges were introduced on GSC Insights so that users could more easily focus on patterns found in the available data. Three badges currently exist. These include:

Trending x% - this represents the comparison between previous performance and the performance over the past 28 days. This badge will only be shown if the trend is considerably greater than your site’s general trend.

Top Five Results – this appears when the average organic Google Search position of your web content over the past 28 days for any given query is 5 or under.

High Average Duration – this badge appears if your content has a high average duration when compared with the other pieces of content on your site. This indicates that your audience finds this content especially engaging.

Using Google Search Console Insights

It’s important for web developers and site owners to make the best use of all the tools at their disposal to create the best possible experiences for users visiting their websites. To this end, Google Search Console Insights can prove to be an invaluable resource.

By paying attention to the information that is revealed, it’s possible to see which elements of your site are performing well and which could do with improvement in order to boost your search engine rankings and make your site even more profitable and successful in the long term.