Both Google Analytics and Google Search Console are excellent tools for optimizing your marketing strategy, but they play different roles.
Believe it or not, one of the best ways to think about using these tools is by comparing them to Nascar.
Yes, you read that right. Nascar.
Now, personally, I’m not a huge fan of the sport. But I understand that there are two components to winning the race: the driver and the car.
If the driver doesn’t know what they’re doing, there’s no way they’ll finish first. And the same can be said if the car’s performance is sub-optimal.
What does any of this have to do Google Analytics vs. Google Search Console?
Google Analytics helps you grow traffic by showing you invaluable metrics about your demographics and sales. It’s your cheat sheet to winning the big race.
In other words, GA makes you a better driver.
And Google Search Console is your vehicle to make it all happen. It tells you about your site’s performance so you can tweak, adjust, and make improvements to reach your goals more quickly.
That makes GSC your engine optimizer.
Put the two together, and you’ll be well on your way to finishing #1 on the SERPs and generating more profit.
In a second, we’ll turn our attention to each tool individually so we can highlight the different aspects they bring to your marketing strategy.
But first, let’s talk about the one thing you need to understand to improve your marketing plan.
The Secret to Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is, for the most part, a formula that anyone can hack. Once you build enough traffic to your site, you can put leads into funnels and get a surprisingly reliable cost per acquisition (CPA) rate.
And CPA is crucial for your business’s success. Here’s why:
Having metrics to depend on can help you create more targeted KPIs to push your goals even further.
Because once you know how many of your clients are likely to convert, you’ll be able to create budgets for your campaigns knowing you’ll see that money come back.
For example, let’s say you sell a subscription-based service at $9.99 per month. That means every lead you convert is worth $119.88 per year.
After some testing, you find that you can consistently convert roughly 3% of your leads. But it costs you $10 to get one good lead with your pay-per-click ads.
Now you can figure out what kind of budget you need to see a good return on investment (ROI) on that traffic. So, in this example, you’d need to spend $1,000 on ads per month to get 100 leads. If you know you’re only going to convert 3% of those leads, you’re looking at 3 new customers who are worth $119.88.
That’s $1,000 spent to see $359.64 come back.
Not a great ROI.
Now isn’t the time to get discouraged though. You’re just actively failing your way upward! With this information you can restrategize to either:
- Lower your advertising costs
- Target customers organically
- Increase your product’s price
- Tweak your website and sales copy to improve conversion rates
- Improve user experience on your site to lose fewer sales
But here’s the thing: you can’t know whether to do any of this unless you have the data to start with.
And where does this data come from? Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Now let’s turn our attention to what Google Analytics can do for your marketing game. Then, we’ll see how Google Search Console can help you restrategize when things aren’t going as planned.
Finally, we’ll sum up with my wild speculations as to why more marketers avoid using both in the right way.
Google Analytics
Whether you’re getting traffic organically or with paid ads, Google Analytics is a must. It lets you not only know how much traffic you’re getting, but it also gives you key metrics on your site’s demographics, behavior, referral sources, and much more.
Any business that’s serious about getting off the ground needs to start by connecting their site to Google Analytics for several reasons:
- It’s free
- It’s easy to set up
- It runs automatically (once installed)
- You can create highly customized goals to get better data about your business
That last one is particularly important.
Often times, I see marketers get excited about setting up Google Analytics. They even take the free certification courses that Google offers to become more proficient with the program.
Then guess what happens? Nothing.
They go back to checking basic metrics like time on page, bounce rates, and page views. Sometimes they even set up a few UTMs without really knowing how to make the most of that data.
Now, don’t get me wrong, these are all valuable metrics to follow.
But they aren’t going to take your marketing strategy to the next level. In this article, I won’t be getting into how to set up custom goals with Google Analytics.
The purpose of this article is to simply make it clear that you can set up highly focused conversion goals (including CPA) that let you make better data-driven decisions about how you’re budgeting time and money.
Ok, so Google Analytics will help you drive your marketing team in the right direction. What about Google Search Console?
Google Search Console
Earlier in this article, we talked about how knowing your cost per acquisition would help you make a better strategy. The ways you may refine your marketing plan included:
- Lower your advertising costs
- Increase your product’s price
- Tweak your website and sales copy to improve conversion rates
- Improve user experience on your site to lose less sales
- Target customers organically
It’s really those last 2 that Google Search Console will help you with.
Let’s look at how.
How GSC Targets Your Customers Organically and Improves User Experience
Acquiring new leads organically doesn’t exclusively mean getting ranked on Google, but that’s what most marketers are after.
And while many newbies will focus on keyword research and link building (which they should), many neglect another aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that’s just as crucial:
Their site’s performance.
This is what Google Search Console does best. Google Search Console will tell you what is and what is not working well with your site. That can include things like:
- Mobile performance
- Page load times
- Indexing issues
- Link maps
And much more. This is all crucial information that you need to know if you want to make your website Google-friendly.
That’s because, at the end of the day, good SEO has written text built to please humans but also Google’s algorithm. Google Search Console is their free way of telling you how happy you’re making them.
But what if you rely on paid ads and don’t care as much about organic traffic or ranking? Is Google Search Console a valuable tool in that case?
Absolutely.
Because even if your marketing plan involves running paid ads, you still need to be sure that your site is performing well to boost user experience.
Remember, once someone clicks an ad, they’ll be redirected to your site. If you have slow page load times, pages that aren’t mobile responsive, or spammy links all over, you’ll be getting fewer leads even with your paid traffic.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
Traffic ≄ Sales
What will get you more profit is having a great product that’s displayed on a user-friendly site. Google Search Console can tell you about those aspects of your site that will either help or harm your users’ experience.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console
If I had to sum up everything in one sentence, it would be this:
Google Analytics helps you understand who your audience is and what content they respond to most while Google Search Console helps you increase user experience and understand what Google responds to most.
Asking which one is better would be like asking which blade on a pair of scissors is sharpest: the answer doesn’t matter because marketers who are serious about growth will focus on both.
So why don’t all marketers check in with both on a regular basis? I’m not 100% sure, but I have a theory:
Keeping up with all the data from just one of these programs can be intimidating. There’s so much information that hits you when you log into either GA or GSC.
In short, it’s overwhelming.
That’s why I made Google Analytics and Google Search Console integrate with Metrics Watch. The goal was simple:
Once you’ve set up the information you need, you can easily get it delivered to your inbox in the way you want.
With Google Analytics, Metrics Watch can pull every metric or KPI from their API. And while Google Search Console’s API is more limited, we can still get the most valuable data you need for a strong marketing strategy, including:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Position
- Click-through-rate
That means you no longer have to sift through tons of information to get your metrics or KPIs. You can simply build a custom report with the data you need from your Metrics Watch account and have that report sent to your inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
And unlike my competitors, there are no annoying PDF or redirect links to another dashboard.
Plus, if you’re working with clients, you can customize the report to match your business and remove all Metrics Watch branding. You’re then left with a personal, professional, and valuable report that runs on auto-pilot.
The best part? You can get started today risk-free (no credit card required). Just sign up to take Metrics Watch for a spin and start building your custom marketing reports now!
Build Automated Digital Marketing Reports Today!