Connecting Search Console and Analytics

Two of this product’s connections are grants of read access to your own Google data: Search Console, which reports what you were shown and clicked for, and Analytics, which reports what visitors did afterwards. Each is a separate grant, each is read-only, and each is attached to one project.

What Search Console changes

• Clicks, impressions and click-through rate, by day, by query and by page.
• A click-through curve fitted to your own data, once you have run an import, which replaces the published average curve when the worklist prices a keyword. Connecting alone does not fit one.
• The Clicks column on the Position tracking table, and the pages the lab performance sample picks.
• The site audit’s card of thinly linked pages that already earn clicks, which needs Search Console’s clicks to know which of them earn any.

Analytics is the other half of the sentence

Search Console says a page earned clicks. Analytics says what happened next — sessions, and the orders your Analytics property itself reports. Days this product synced before it began asking for orders have no order figure rather than a figure of nought, so a window holding such a day has no conversion rate at all instead of a wrong one.

How far back, and how often

Google keeps about 486 days of daily Search Analytics rows and serves nothing older, so that is the floor a backfill reaches for and no further: asking beyond it is requests spent on guaranteed emptiness. Each property syncs roughly daily, and a recent day is re-fetched for a few days afterwards because Google finalises a day two or three days after the fact.

A window ends where the data ends

Every dated comparison on these screens — the tiles, the charts, the rising and falling queries — takes both of its windows from the newest day your own sync holds rather than from today. Counting back from today instead drew the everyday one-day lag as a fall every night, and drew a property that had stopped syncing as a collapse to nothing.

Two consequences follow. A change is only drawn once the earlier window is wholly stored, which is why the twelve-month view has no comparison at all — two of its windows do not fit in what Google retains. And a sync that has genuinely stalled is said in words, with the day the figures end on, rather than drawn as a fall.

Imports

A project holds one Search Console import at a time, replaced whole when you import again. The cost is that there is no history of imports to compare; the benefit is that no screen can ever show you a stale import beside a fresh curve, because there is only ever one to show.