Google Analytics is not just for tracking or reporting. For any SEO expert or marketing professional, it is integral to helping their client’s business grow and earn money. One of the best features of GA is that it can be integrated with several platforms such as Google Ads and Google Search Console. Let’s learn more about integrating Ads and Search Console with GA and how it can help your business grow.
Google Search Console provides you with the tools to measure your site’s organic traffic and gain insights into your website’s search ranking. This is where you would also fix any issues that may impact your website’s ranking. An SEO expert can use it to find technical errors that can happen during the crawl (crawling refers to the process by which a search engine stores the content of a website, which is known as indexing), learn which search queries are driving the most traffic to your website, track performance, and learn more about how your high-value keywords are tracking.
You can directly link Google Analytics with Search Console through the ‘Search Console Setting’. You need to enable ‘Data Sharing’ under the ‘Search Console’ property before doing this. With this integration, you can gain more insights into the effect of organic traffic on your websites. Furthermore, you can also learn more about the keyword specific engagements on a web page and help your SEO expert further refine their strategy.
With this integration, the SEO expert and digital marketer have a single platform to access behaviour, acquisition and conversion metrics together. The scope of search extended to Google Analytics allows for creating a better approach to search marketing.
You can now view the revenue generated by a specific page in comparison to the changes in its average search ranking, which is a great way to learn about the short-term value of your SEO efforts. Instead of viewing your Ads performance or organic traffic separately, you can now view them together and create a more comprehensive marketing strategy. Let’s look at 2 things that you can do with this integration to increase your website’s traffic, and improve conversion rate.
You can set up an advanced filter to see content coming up on the 2nd page of Google’s search results. Content on the 2nd page of search results has almost ‘made it’, but it is not yet where the visitor is most likely to see it - Page 1. Nudging it from Page 2 to Page 1 will give your website a significant traffic boost. Sometimes, doing this is as simple as modifying the title tag or some on-page SEO. Once you use this integration and find such pages, your SEO expert should be able to help you get it to Page 1.
Visitors from organic searches may have a slightly higher chance of conversion compared to those from paid ads. Regardless of how well your ad campaigns may be doing - you cannot ignore organic search data. This integration makes it easier to keep track of and improve upon your website’s performance in search engine results. This data also allows you to keep a check on the pages with the highest traffic and strategically refresh their content to increase traffic. Any SEO expert will affirm the fact that increasing traffic on an existing page by updating content is a proven and highly effective strategy.
This integration takes care of the visitors you get from organic searches - the next part involves integrating data from Google Ads, the paid advertisement network. Let’s go ahead and see what your SEO expert can help accomplish when you integrate your Google Analytics account with Google Ads.
Formerly known as Google Adwords, Google Ads is where you manage your paid advertising campaigns for Google’s platforms. It is an amazing product, but it does lack a few things. With Google Ads alone, you do not learn much about what a visitor does after clicking your ad. Some keywords will produce a higher bounce rate, a longer site visit, or more curiosity in the visitor, but you cannot track all that in Ads. Beyond conversion rates, you will not learn about the keywords responsible for specific activities in Google Ads alone. The solution? Google Ads integration with Analytics.
Integrating Google Ads with Analytics is simple and you just need to link both these accounts. Once done, you can see metrics like pages per visit, the average duration of visit bounce rate, and a lot more within the Analytics interface. Your SEO expert can leverage the insights from Analytics into achieving various goals that would not be visible otherwise in Google Ads and vice versa.
With this integration, an SEO expert can analyze what happens after a visitor clicks on the ad. How long does the average session last, what pages did the visitor go to, what is the average session duration, etc. - it can all be tracked with your Analytics and Ads data in once place.
An effective strategy for winning customers is to target them based on the point where they dropped off from converting into a customer. With the right set of Analytics data, an SEO expert can do just that. These remarketing campaigns based on the user’s checkout behaviour can help e-commerce websites improve their conversion rate.
This integration also allows you to target users with the right messaging. For instance, a user who subscribed to a newsletter is already interested in your product. With the right persuasion and ad targeting, you can increase your chances of converting the visitor to a customer. You also need to avoid spending money on ads for people who have already made a purchase. A customer who has already bought your product is not as likely to purchase it again within the next few weeks, so you can avoid remarketing to such an audience for some time.
Automated analytics are also an integral part of many businesses, especially subscription-based e-commerce stores. When your SEO expert links Ads with Analytics, you can analyse the customer lifetime value and create different audience sets based on the number of orders and last purchase of the customer. This allows you to target ads to the right people, who know your products and are loyal to the product. You can thus increase your ROI and get great results with comparatively fewer efforts.
The examples that we have talked about are just some of the things that you can do by integrating Google Analytics with Google Ads and Google Search Console. Google Ads and Search Console are some of the most useful platforms for an SEO expert, and when used with Google Analytics, they truly can help a business grow.