Analyzing your performance and planning the next move for your website is a very crucial and constant thing in maintaining your website. Google Analytics lends you a helping hand in doing that, but there’s one more tool known as Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tool).

They both are free and they both can provide you with a lot of data about your website, from how much time people spend on your website to how many backlinks are present on each page.

Finding out that they both are equally important for your website, the question arises that “What Is The Difference Between Google Search Console And Google Analytics”.

Great question, it’s quite a must to know that what are the different services they provide and how they can help you to keep a hawk-eye on your website’s performance.

Since they perform completely different functions and all of them are required for your website’s growth, we’re gonna check out most of them one by one. If you have not setup google search console and google analytics, then do it very first.

Fasten Your Seatbelts, The Ride Starts Here.

Direct Comparison between Google Search Console and Google Analytics

Both of these tools perform endless functions that can help you in tracking performance and optimizing your website.

To grow constantly you would have to use the data from both GSC and GA in tracking and optimizing for good.

Now let’s take a look at the most basic differences between them and understand what can they do for your website in the small picture.

Google Search Console for Optimization

GSC is used to optimize websites. It gives you very informative intel, which helps you to keep improvising the technical performance of your website to rank better.

Google search console (or Google webmaster tool) can provide you data on:

• The generating backlinks (it can tell you who is linking to your website)
• Searching for technical errors on each page
• Deep intel on present keywords

Google Analytics for tracking

GA offers more than 10,000 metrics to track the progress of your website. It can be very helpful in analyzing the audience and responding according to their nature. It offers a big number of helpful functions like:

• Number of users visiting to your website
• How did they found your website
• The time they spent on each page
• What region did they come from
• And even what was the nature of their visit

And many more.

Now that you know what are they used for,

Let’s Dive Into The Pool Of Knowledge To Learn About Their Most Useful Functions In Details.

Here We Go.

5 Crucial Functions That Can Be Tracked By Google Search Console

Google Search Console is for those people who want to make their website “technically perfect” by optimizing every granular detail to the end. GSC provides you data directly from Google giving insights into if your website’s vibe matches with Google or not. Driven data can be quite helpful in improving ranking on SERPs.

Crucial Links

Search Console can track backlinks of your website and provide complete data of which website was used for d your website’s link.

Backlinks are quiet crucial for SEO.

While backlinks that exist on high DA/PA sites could improve your rankings. Those on low or untrustful DA/PA sites could reduce your rankings too.

So you must know that how many and where are those links are present and GSC offers you complete data on that so that you can optimize as you want.

Deleting Toxic Links

Search Console tracks down the backlinks that are not helpful for your website and rather can be toxic.

GSC allows disavowing of toxic backlinks. Disavowing is the term for notifying Google to do not to count a specific link as a backlink of your website so that your website does not get hurt.

Why is it important to restrict links? Restricting or disavowing some specific backlinks are very important as they can harm your website, could be extremely toxic and can ultimately result in reducing your ranking on SERPs.

But it is must know that every link on a low DA/PA site ain’t harmful, if the links of the page that are embedded to the keyword are specific or quite related then it can be helpful as it can draw more potential audience to you.

Search Analytics

It provides you with better insights into the path your organic traffic took to come to you.

GSC breaks down the data and shows you in the form of:

• Queries: The keywords that were used in the searched query. It is very helpful as it can be used to understand the audience for what they want and can be implemented for better results.
• Clicks: Number of clicks that happened on your link to the website organically on a SERP.
• Impression: Number of times the link to your website showed up in the search results.
• CTR: Total number of clicks in division of the total number of impressions. This means the ratio of people who saw your website and clicked on it in search results.
• Positions: Average position of your website on a search engine result page.

Mobile-First Approach

Google said earlier that they are implementing a mobile-first policy for ranking websites on SERPs.

This means that even if your website is performing well on desktop, you would have to improve your performance on mobile too or elsewise it would get demoted in ranking.

Search Console provides you data on how good your website perform on mobile and how you can improve it.

Coverage Reporting

Search Console crawls your site in periods (if you’ve submitted a sitemap). And it lets you know about all the coverage issues that your website has.

Usually, the issues include HTML errors, crawling errors or basic technical issues.

Which are divided into Errors, Valid with a warning, Valid and Excluded to help you know the intensity of the problem and let you fix that in seconds.

6 Crucial Functions That Can Be Tracked By Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides you with more than 1,000 metrics to check the performance growth of your website. It may sound overwhelming it’s not.

You can check if your Seo or other marketing practices worked or not by watching over the daily analysis report of your website. You may not want to or able to use all for them, but it’s important to know some of the vital functions.

Time Spent On Website

This metric lets you know the average time on page and average session duration of your audience.

It is considered one of the most crucial ranking factors for search engines by SEO experts.

It’s simple to understand that the more time your audience spent on your website, the more Google will take your website as useful.

In a survey done by Hubspot, they claimed that 55% of the audience spent less than 15 sec on a page.

You can use GA data to track page session time, time on site and bounce rate (which is preferable should be between 45% – 65%) to understand what your users watch and want.

A promising average time for a website should be around 46 sec.

Demographics

Analytics can bring up and break down the audience’s demographic data into age and gender.

You can check out if your main audience is young adults or married moms or it could be retired elders and you can improve your site’s content and look according to that.

Acquisition

A very important factor in SEO, it lets you know where the audience is coming from.

It can split visitors into the following categories:

• Direct: The ones who directly typed your domain on a search engine.
• Referral: People who found your page’s link on a blog or website.
• Organic Search: Audience which came through searching a keyword and finding you on a SERP.
• Social Media: People came through social media like Facebook, Instagram or Linked In etc.
• Email: The ones who came to you by finding your website’s link on an email.

Landing Page Performance

Landing page performance provides vital data for turning the audience into buyers.

If you have multiple campaigns running, you can check everyone’s landing page performance. And find out which one’s are more fascinating to people.

Analytics breaks down their performance in session, bounce rate, number of new visitors and average session time.

You can use the high performing landing page’s data to improve the performance of the page on which you want to attract more visitors.

Unique Pageviews

Provides you several individuals who have viewed a specific page on your website.

It helps you track the performance of each page.

Provides more sense on what people are coming for on your website and how you should move on your efforts.

Audience Behavior

It provides you impressive granular data on WHAT visitors did on your website. Including,

• What page did they enter from?
• Where do they jumped next in your website?
• How much time did they spend on each page?
• What page did they exit from?
• Did they ever return or not?

Other Amazing Metrics

As there are a big number of functions that Analytics can perform, we can’t cover everything but here are some of the other useful GA metrics.

• Goal tracking
• Event tracking
• Conversion tracking
• Site speed metrics
• Real-time visitor insights
• Revenue tracking
• Complex reports 

Console or Analytics

Now, if your question is which one is better in Google Analytics and Google Search Console, then unluckily there is no exact answer. Both of them provide crucial information and tremendously valuable data that can help you make better decisions for your business.

So, it’s very much safe to say that you should use both of them to draw data from your website and keep it improving. Using them together provides you with both internal and external views of your site’s performance which is very helpful for the betterment of your website.

I’m glad that you read it all and I hope that you would have got the answers that you were found.

If not, then feel free to comment or contact us, we’ll be so happy to help your website become better.