Online marketing and search engine optimization has become synonymous with doing any business online. Staying on top of your company’s online marketing is crucial, and new tools and options are always coming out to make that task easier. However, some of the older tools have great usefulness and Google provides many free tools that will help bring valuable insight to your marketing and ability to convert visitors into leads and eventually into customers.
Two of the biggest marketing and monitoring suites that business owners and webmasters have in their arsenal are Google Analytics and Google’s Webmaster Tools. These are products from Google that let a website’s owner learn about how people come to the website and what they do once they are on it. Google also allows the ability link Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts, giving marketers a one-stop shop for all of their SEO and online marketing data. This is a major step forward in making online marketing simpler and more convenient, and anyone who uses one or both of these toolkits should link them up now to get the full benefits of the combination.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides the website owner with detailed information about how visitors interact with the site. Analytics tracks stats like how many pages different users visit once they are on the site, the amount of time they spent on the site, and whether they left immediately or stuck around. This last stat is called the bounce rate, and it’s an important measure of how well the site is keeping the interest of its visitors.
One of the issues with Google Analytics is that much of the once freely given keyword data (that online marketers depended on) is now being hidden. This means marketers have to be more resourceful on learning what keywords (or intent) brought the visitor the website.
Webmaster Tools
Webmaster Tools is a slightly different way of looking at your website. Webmaster Tools focuses on how your site performs in terms of attracting visitors in the first place. For example, you can learn about your click-through rate for visitors who see your site on search engine results pages and find out how many people see the site at all. This is powerful data because it tells you how well your SEO work is doing at pushing your site higher up in the rankings and attracting more visitors.
Linking both of these together means that site owners can finally get a complete end-to-end picture of the site’s online marketing pipeline, from keyword search all the way up to purchase. This lets you target bottlenecks in the process to maximize your return on investment.
How to link Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
Performing the link is fairly straightforward. Keep in mind that Google’s new title for Webmaster Tools is the Search Console. You will not link a Search Console account to an Analytics account- instead, you link a particular site that already uses Search Console to Analytics, which kicks off the process of generating Analytics reports along with Search Console data.
Start at the home page for Search Console. On your list of sites, you should see a button marked “Manage Property.”
Click on that or the link to the website to be taken to the home page dashboard of the web property.
Then on “Search Traffic.”
After that, there will be an option to link the site to a given Google Analytics web property. Just choose the property you want to associate.
The potential benefits from combining these two analytical tools are great. The stream of data from observing both which visitors click on the site and what they do when they arrive is the clearest vision possible of how customers interact with the brand.
And if you are going to invest in online marketing, why not take the time to make sure you are maximizing every dollar spent. So if you haven’t already link these properties together, do it. And do it now.
