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What is search console insights?

November 8, 2022

Google Search Console Insights is a new experience by Google that has been tailored specifically for content creators and publishers. 

If you manage a website, it’s important to understand how Google Search Console can help you. Google Search Console Insights is a powerful tool that can help you understand how your site is performing in Google Search. This new experience is powered by data from both Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Search Console Insights is designed to help site owners understand which content resonates with their audience and how they find it.

The data provided by Search Console Insights can be used to improve your site’s ranking in Google Search, and the tool can also be used to troubleshoot any issues you may be having with your site. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to use Search Console Insights to your advantage.

 

Search Console Handy View

Understand your reach

Learn how and where people discover your content across the web.

 

Gain audience insights

See what people search for on Google via Google Analytics before they visit your content.

 

Optimize your content

See via Gooly Analytics what pieces of content are performing best.

Search Insights is powered by data from both Google Search Console and Google Analytics. If you haven’t setup GSC yet, here you find everything you need to know how to setup Google Search Console.

what is search console insights
Search Console Insights Overview

How can Search Console Insights help you?

Search Console Insights can help site owners, content creators and bloggers to better understand their content’s performance so that they can improve their content. For instance, it can help answer the following questions:

  1. What are my best performing pieces of content?
  2. How are my new pieces of content performing?
  3. How do people discover my content across the web?
  4. What people search for on Google before they visit my content?
  5. Which article refers users to my website and content?
 

What is Search Console Insight not for?

Search Console Insights does not answer the question “Has my website been indexed correctly by Google?“, “did I receive a Penalty from Google (a so-called Manual Action)?” or “did I submit my sitemap correctly?“. It does also not show if your site has been de-indexed.
 
If this is the case, please refer to Google Search Console itself and our blog post about why your website might have been deindexed.
 
It does further not help you to identify Malware Attacks. If you think your website got hacked, check our blog post “7 types of wordpress attacks and how to avoid them“.

 

screenshot search console insights

Who can use Search Console Insights?

Google Search Console Insights is a part of Google Search Console, so anyone with a verified Google Search Console property can use it. It is suggested that you link your site’s Google Search Console property to your site’s Google Analytics property so that you can learn a lot more and better things about your content. 

But even if you don’t use Google Analytics, you can still use Search Console Insights.

To get the full experience and the best insights about your content, Google recommends associating (linking) your Google Analytics property with your relevant Search Console property. Search Console Insights supports Google Analytics Universal Analytics properties (their ID starts with a “UA-“) and since late 2022 it also supports Google Analytics 4.

How to associate Google Analytics with Google Search Console Insights?

To create an association, you need to:

  1. Visit Google Search Console’s Association settings page
  2. Hit the “Associate” button
  3. Select the relevant Google Analytics property

Make sure that the sidebar has the right property set.

 

search console insights how to associate

If you can’t click the “Associate” button or do so and still don’t see the right Google Analytics account, you probably don’t have permission to access that GA account.

Once you’ve set up an association, your Google Analytics account should be listed under “Associated Services.”

How can you access Search Console Insights?

There are a few ways to access Google Search Console Insights:

At the top of the Overview page for Google Search Console, click “Search Console Insights.”
In the iOS Google app, tap your profile picture in the top-right corner of the screen to open the account menu. Then, choose “Search Console Insights” from the list of options (support for the Android Google App is coming soon).

 

search console insights start
Where to start search console insights

You can get to it through the feature “Google Search Console in search results.”

Or use just this link to access it directly and go straight to it. Save it as a bookmark!

You can also search for “Search Console Insights” on Google to find the site.

A tour of Search Console Insights

The Search Console Insights dashboard is simple to use. It offers data in a basic, easy-to-understand format, allowing you to uncover crucial data without having to spend time sifting for it or having an extensive degree in SEO analytics.

The primary dashboard displays information about your whole site. You may get statistics relevant to each page by selecting any of the pages listed in the “Recent Content” and “Most Popular Content” categories.

Each of the sections supplied by Search Console Insights is listed below:

Page Views

The Search Console Insights analysis begins with a “Overview” of your site, emphasizing high-performing pages.

The first part tracks the views on your website over the last 28 days and displays the average time spent on the page during that time period.

search insights example pageviews

The percentages under each sum show the difference in figure from the first to the last day. The page view count for a certain day may be viewed by choosing any point on the graph.

New Content

The following section displays items you’ve created in the previous 28 days. Each item is displayed with the number of page views and the average page view duration.

This section will be empty if you haven’t published any new pages or content during that time frame.

Most Popular Content

The final component of the “Overview” category displays the most popular material on your site.

The 15 most popular pages on your site in the last 28 days are listed below. These are listed in descending order of page views (shown next to the eye icon).

This section also shows the average amount of time spent on each page, as well as a preview of the top search phrases that led users to that page from the Google search engine results page (SERP).

If you click on an item, you’ll be taken to a new screen with extensive insights relevant to that page connected to the parts in “How People Find You.”

Top Traffic Channels

The “How People Find You” category follows the “Overview” category. Its first part lists the major traffic sources for your website.

There are three possible channels provided:

  • Organic Search
    Traffic from any search engine like Google or Bing
  • Direct
    Traffic from link clicks apart from those found on search engines, social media or other sites. This could include browser bookmarks or links sent to someone in email.
  • Referral
    Traffic from people clicking links found on other websites
search console insights top traffic channels

Google Search

See what people search for on Google before they visit your content. The next part displays the top 50 Google search queries (called keywords) that direct visitors to your website. They are ordered by the number of times they have been clicked in a Google SERP.

Under each query, the average rank position for that term is shown. 

This list shows the “Most Searched Queries” by default. If you click the drop-down menu, you can change to “Most Popular Queries.” This list shows which search queries got more clicks in the last 28 days than they did before. 

Referring links from other websites

Here we see a breakdown of link referrals to your site. The default list shows the “Top Referring Links” from other sites to yours, including how many page views the link generated and which page it linked to.

Social media

The last part of the Search Insights report shows how people use social media to find our site. In particular, it ranks the social media sites based on how many page views they got.

If you ever need help figuring out what the data in these sections mean or how to use them to improve performance, just tap the graduation cap in the upper-right corner of each section.
At the time this was written, these were all the parts that Google Search Console Insights offered. 

How can you share feedback about Search Console Insights?

Since the Google Developers are constantly improving the tool, you can give them easily feedback. At the top and bottom of Search Console Insights, you can use the “Share Feedback” link. 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Who can use Search Console Insights?

Anyone with a verified Google Search Console property can use Search Console Insights.

 

How can you share feedback about Search Console Insights?

At the top and bottom of Search Console Insights, you can use the “Share Feedback” link. 

 

How can you access Search Console Insights?

At the top of the Overview page for Google Search Console, click “Search Console Insights.” Or use just this link to go straight to it.

 

How do I use Google Search Console Insights?

Link your site’s Google Search Console property to your site’s Google Analytics property and open the Search Console Insights Dashboard via this link.

 

Is Google Search Console Insights free?

Yes, absolutely.

 

What is Google insights for Search?

Views, queries, and actions from both organic search results and Google Ads are included in the insights data. Google Insights offers several ways to learn about how people engage with your listing: How customers will discover your listing. Search terms.

 

Why should I link Google Search Console to Google Analytics?

By connecting Search Console and Google Analytics, you can better understand how rankings and individual keywords affect organic performance and user behavior on your website.

 

What is the difference between Search Console and Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is designed for users, delivering information about individuals who visit and engage with your website. Google Search Console, on the other hand, is search-engine-focused, offering tools and insights to assist site owners increase their visibility and presence in SERPs.

 

Why can’t I see Google Analytics data in Search Console Insights?

If you correctly connect GA to Search Console, you will have access to additional insights that will help you analyze the performance of your content. If you do not make an association, you will only be able to view the Google Search card.

There are a few reasons why your GA data may not be appearing on GSC Insights:

  1. Your GSC property is not associated with a GA property: visit the help center to learn how to create an association. In particular, if you have separate properties for your HTTP and HTTPS traffic on GSC, make sure to associate the property that receives the most traffic or consider verifying a domain property to include all your traffic in one place. Note that you can’t link Google Analytics 4 properties for now, but we’re working on it.
  2. You do not have sufficient permissions on GA: if your GSC property is associated with a GA property, and you still cannot see GA data, check that you have Read and Analyze permissions to the associated GA property.
  3. You have the wrong GA view selected in GSC: GSC Insights brings GA data for a specific GA view under the associated property. If you have no views under the property, we won’t be able to populate data. You can see or change the selected view in the Search Console Associations page.

 

How does Search Console Insights choose “new content”?

The New content card displays pages on your site that have received their first pageviews during the previous 28 days. We may additionally provide the top Search searches for the leading canonical URL for each title. To appear, content is ordered by recency and must have at least a few views. We utilize three key pieces of information to populate this card:

We begin by looking at page titles that have gotten traffic in the last 28 days but have not had any traffic in the previous year.
We use numerous rules to clean the data and filter out sites that are less likely to include new material, such as title updates, comment pages, internal search result pages, and others.
We remove duplicate translations and maintain the best-performing title. To minimize confusion with the data in the GA interface, we do not aggregate translated page metrics.
If we didn’t report your new material, it doesn’t imply it doesn’t have GA traffic or isn’t indexed. When extracting data from GA, GSC Insights may display material that is not indexed. Also, fresh material is not affected by the initial crawl time; your content does not need to be crawled or indexed in order to appear in this card.

 

How does Search Console Insights choose the “most popular content”?

The most popular content card shows your top-performing page titles by pageviews in the last 28 days. For each title, we may also indicate the top Search queries for the leading canonical URL. To see more Search data for this content, you can click it and drilldown to the page overview.

If the URL is not under the associated GSC property, we won’t be able to bring Search data.

 

How can clicks be lower than pageviews in the Google Search card?

There are three main reasons for clicks being lower than pageviews:

  • Each click can trigger more than a single pageview – other pageviews during the session are also attributed to google / organic. Learn more about the way sessions are defined and classified.
  • GA pageviews for google / organic include more surfaces than web search results, such as Discover, Image Search and Video Search.
  • GA and GSC don’t necessarily report on the same group of pages. For example, you might have a GSC account that includes only your HTTP pages while the GA view you chose reports on both HTTP and HTTPS.

 

What do the different badges in the GSC Insights cards mean?

The badges on GSC Insights help you focus your attention on interesting patterns in the data. There are three different badges:

  1. High avg. duration: the content has a high average duration compared to your site’s other pieces of content. This might be content your audience found engaging.
  2. Top 5 results: the average position on Google Search (organic) of your content in the last 28 days for the given query is five or less.
  3. Trending x%: represents a comparison between the last 28 days and the previous performance. This badge is only shown when the trend is significantly greater than the general site trend.

 

Contact us
markus-seo

Markus Schad | Senior SEO Strategist

Markus Schad is Senior SEO Consultant with over 8 years experience in getting more traffic and visitors for his customers. He is the founder of Commander-SEO.com.

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