Google Analytics and Search Console data do not match.
This discrepancy creates the impression that the data is somehow inaccurate.
The truth is, the data is actually accurate. The differences lie in what’s being tracked and how Google chooses to present it.
Google Analytics and Search Console
reconcile Google Analytics and search console Data can be difficult because the numbers don’t really match.
The reason is that both services are solving different problems. For this reason, both services take different approaches to collecting and reporting data.
Purpose of Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides insights designed to communicate how well the site itself is performing User Engagement Metrics (time on page, etc.), report on conversion-related goals, and display Website visitor activity on the site itself.
Typical reports include:
An important thing to note about the data provided by Google Analytics is that it measures the performance of a website (in terms of website visitors).
Although Google Analytics provides Web page performanceThe report focuses on relative to website traffic and Behaviour relative to website visitors.
Google Analytics Overview page Reflects concern for website visitors:
“Learn more about your customers. Google Analytics gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your business in one place.
Knowing your website…Users can better evaluate the performance of your marketing, content, products, and more. “
The fundamental purpose of Google Analytics is very different from Search Console, which focuses on site performance Relative to search visibility.
Purpose of Google Search Console
Search Console provides insights designed to help publishers See how their website is performing in a google search.
Search Console also provides search and indexing data that can help with search visibility issues.
On a different level, Search Console provides a way for Google to proactively communicate with publishers about search visibility issues, such as manual actions (penalties), hacked states, improperly configured structured data, Mobile usability issuesand other useful information to help publishers maintain optimal search visibility in Google Search.
Finally, Search Console provides a way for publishers to Debug localized language issuesset a site-wide national goals, Deny inbound linksand other tasks around improving search visibility.
Google’s Search Console Help Page List these data points:
- Confirm that Google can Find and crawl your site.
- Fix indexing issues and request reindexing of new or updated content.
- View Google search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries showed your site, how often searchers clicked on those queries, and more.
- You’ll be alerted when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues with your site.
- Shows you which websites link to yours.
- Addresses issues with AMP, mobile usability, and other search features.
The first reason Search Console and Analytics data is different is that each product serves a different purpose—they do different things.
Search Console and Analytics Difference Explanation
Because the two services serve different purposes, Google Search Console and Analytics aggregate data in different ways, so reports will be different and look different.
The data is accurate, but it’s just displayed differently.
Below is a list of different reasons why Analytics and Search Console data may differ.
Search is defined differently
One of the main reasons for the difference between Google Analytics and Search Console is the way they measure search traffic.
What Google Analytics calls search traffic is different from what Search Console calls search traffic.
Google Analytics collapses Google Discover data into search categories.
This means that when you analyze traffic related to organic search in Analytics, not only traffic from the Google search box, but also traffic from Google Discover.
However, Google Search Console separates traffic from Google Discover from organic search results, displaying a separate Google Discover traffic report.
Search Console and Analytics with JavaScript
Google Analytics will only report data collected from website visitors JavaScript activated on their browser.
Search Console collects data regardless of whether the browser has JavaScript enabled.
Google Analytics blocked from collecting data
Another reason for the mismatch between Search Console and Analytics is that Analytics tracking is increasingly being blocked online.
Google Analytics cannot collect data from privacy-focused browsers and analytics-blocking extensions.
E.g, Browser extension for DuckDuckGo and Mozilla’s Firefox Both prevent google analytics from loading.
Search Console data is not blocked, so this is another way to potentially collect more or different data in Search Console and deviate from the data collected in Google Analytics.
time delay difference
Another reason why traffic data reporting is different between Search Console and Google Analytics is that Search Console data is delayed by several days, while Analytics can report data in seconds.
Delays in Search Console reporting can result in incomplete data when viewed.
Search Console omits some queries
Search Console protects user privacy, so the Search Console performance reports will ignore data from certain types of queries.
a google Search Console help page explained:
“To protect user privacy, performance reports do not show all data.
For example, we may not track certain queries that are infrequent or that contain personal or sensitive information.
Certain processing of our source data may cause these statistics to differ from those listed in other sources (eg, deduplication).
However, these changes should not be significant. “
Total Anonymous Queries in Performance Reports
For the reasons mentioned earlier, the data in the performance report does not match the organic traffic data in Google Analytics, and anonymous queries are another reason why the Search Console performance data is far from the data reported in Analytics.
For privacy reasons, Google Search Console omits what it calls very rare search queries.
Anonymous queries are included in total But not included when filtering in performance reports.
Google’s Search Console Support Page Status:
“Very rare queries (known as anonymous queries) are not shown in these results to protect the privacy of users who make queries.
Anonymous queries are always omitted from the table. Anonymous queries will be included in the graph total unless you filter by query (queries with or without the given string).
If your site has a lot of anonymous queries, you may notice a significant difference between the total and (queries with some_string + queries without some_string).
This is because anonymous queries are ignored whenever a filter is applied. “
time zone difference
Google Analytics reports daily and monthly data based on the publisher’s time zone.
The publisher’s time zone is set in the analytics view settings, where you can set your preferred time zone for your site.
Google Search Console reports data based on Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), which is the California time zone, regardless of the country or time zone the site is set to.
This creates a situation where Search Console assigns data to one time zone and Google Analytics assigns data to a different time zone (when the site time zone is outside of California).
This will have a major impact on how the data is reported, as it will all but guarantee that the daily and monthly traffic data between Search Console and Analytics will never match.
according to Google Analytics page for editing view settings:
“Time zone country or region: The country and time zone that you want to use as the date boundary for the report, regardless of where the data comes from.
For example, if you select US, Los Angeles time, the start and end times of each day will be calculated based on Los Angeles time, even if the click is from New York, London, or Moscow.
If you choose a time zone that observes daylight saving time, Analytics automatically adjusts for the change.
If you don’t want Google Analytics to adjust for daylight savings time, you can use GMT instead of your local time zone. “
Landing page URL differences
Landing pages in Search Console are aggregated to some extent, while landing page URLs are not aggregated in Google Analytics.
Google’s support page explains it this way:
“Landing page dimensions: Search Console aggregates its data under the canonical URL (learn more), while Analytics uses the actual landing page URL.
This distinction will affect reports that include the Landing Page dimension, including Landing Page and Device/Country (when Landing Page is added as a secondary dimension).
For example, impression and traffic metrics for web, mobile web, and AMP URLs can be aggregated…under canonical URLs…”
Search Console data is limited
Another important difference in data reporting between Search Console and Google Analytics is that Search Console can only report data for up to 1,000 landing page URLs.
Google Analytics does not have this limit and can report landing pages with more than 1,000 URLs.
Google Analytics The support page explains the difference:
“Number of URLs logged per site per day:
Search Console can record up to 1,000 landing page URLs.
Analytics does not respect the 1,000 URL limit and can include more landing pages. “
Data discrepancies in Search Console and Analytics
There are discrepancies in the data measured and reported by Search Console and Analytics.
Reasons for the discrepancy include the time zone from which the traffic event was attributed to the way the landing page was aggregated.
The fact that there is a discrepancy between the numbers reported in Search Console and Analytics does not indicate a problem with the data.
These are two different products that report data in different ways, that’s all.
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