What is the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a Webmaster tool to help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues.

Google Analytics tracks website activity of the users in session duration, session, bounce rate, source of the traffic, etc.

Simply speaking:

Google Search Console = Webmaster Tool

Google Analytics = Marketer Tool

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free tool provides by Google, for website owners, web master, SEO specialists to have clear picture of website traffics, to assist their website design, SEO activities and marketing planning.

SEO Services CC – Google Analytics

Above is an example of website traffic statistic generated from Google Analytics. With this free tool, apart from knowing how many visitors daily, source of these traffics, traffic history over period of time, traffic changes, session, conversions, etc. you can find out visitors information, eg where did they find your website, their location, demographic information, popular landing pages, peak time of the day, tracking PPC, Google ads performance etc These information is critical to prepare marketing plan to target audience.

Google Analytics (GA) Home/Summary Panel:

If GA doesn’t link with E-commerce/Online Shop, general summary shows users (unique visitors) , session, bounce rate, average session duration.

If GA links with E-commerce/Online shop, statistic summary will include users, revenue (sales), conversion rate and sessions.

Look:

Statistics let you have a clear vision of web traffics, visitors behavior when landing on your website.

For instance, bounce rate tells you if your visitors were interested with contents in landing page, high bounce rate indicating that high ratio of web traffics left your website without further interaction, eg visitor more pages. High bounce rate could be relevancy of your contents, attractiveness, or navigation system, etc. webmaster shall investigate the reason and fix promptly.

Whilst, average session duration is another figure telling you how long in average your visitors had stayed in your website. In addition, Google uses this as factor to determine if your contents are matching what visitors searching for. Thus, if average session rate too low, you may need to revise content to make it more attractive to visitors and keep them in your website longer.

Google Analytics (GA) Traffic Channel/Source Panel:

This panel provides you traffic source. It helps greatly for business owners to understand where do they gain traffics from., channel, location, demographics of visitors.

Therefore, marketers can distribute marketing resources to the most popular traffic sources.

Traffic sources are represented in bar chart, color coded indicating Organic Search traffics, Paid Search traffics, Direct traffics, Social traffics, Display traffics, and others (unclassified). Thus, business owners can easily identify the most efficient channel to promote business.

More features must have for digital marketing:

GA provides you also peak time of traffics, return visitors ratio, Google Ads (AdWords) performance, popular landing pages, device ratio, E-commerce performance.

In conclusion, GA is a powerful digital marketing tool for every marketers and business owners to understand website performance, traffics, in order to generate tailored marketing plan.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a webmaster free tool by Google.  Main purpose of this tool is to allow website owner and webmaster to know if any errors f in website. Webmaster can check crawled and indexed web pages, search and visitors interaction, etc. Search Console tools and reports help business owners measure website’s traffic and performance, and hints to issue fixing.

SEO Services CC – Google Search Console

In digital marketing, we us both tools to keep track of performance of website, advertising campaign (linked with Google Ads/AdWords), traffic source (as in location, demographic, channels). These data helps a lot in planning marketing and SEO strategies.

SEO Services CC is a Melbourne based SEO/PPC agency, offering SEO/PPC services to businesses in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast, SunShine Coast, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Darwin.