Google Search Console provides users with data about their website's performance on Google Search, but this data can be difficult to interpret. To make better decisions supported by data, it can help to create a custom dashboard with data visualizations using Google Data Studio.
This post is the first in a series that will focus on exporting, enhancing, and visualizing Search Console data using Google Data Studio. It discusses how to bring your Search Console data into Google Data Studio. An example is given of downloading Search Console data into Google Sheets, enhancing the data with geographical regions, and connecting the spreadsheet to Data Studio.
Future posts in the series will discuss how to create data visualizations to help you monitor and analyze your website's performance data.
If you want to use the same data from Search Console in Google Data Studio, you can use the Google Data Studio data connector. To do this, visit the connector gallery, choose Search Console, and select the property you want to connect. You can find a guide to the connector in the Data Studio Help Center.
If you want to enhance the data provided by Search Console (for example, by clustering countries into regions), you need to export the data from the web interface or through the API. You can then manipulate the data with Google Sheets or BigQuery and connect it to Data Studio.
In this post, we’ll discuss the second option, since it requires more steps and offers more customization opportunities. There are three main steps you need to take:
- Export Search Console data.
- Add your own data on top of it.
- Import it into Data Studio.
In order to export your data from the Search Console Performance report, visit the report, choose a date range, click Export, and choose Google Sheets. This will create a new spreadsheet. You can also use the Search Analytics API for a more automated solution, but that's out of scope for this post.
You can read more about the dimensions and metrics that will be available to you in the Performance report help documentation.
Enhance Search Console data
To show how to enhance your Search Console data, we’ll use a neat Google Sheets function, IMPORTDATA, which can import data from a URL. In our example, we’re importing the[ISO 3166 countries by region](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/richjenks/15b75f1960bc3321e295/raw /62749882ed0e9dffa3edd7a9a44a7be59df8402c /countries .md ) table .
The following text provides instructions on how to add a new sheet to the data exported from Search Console, and how to use the [VLOOKUP](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093318) function to match the regions to the countries. A sample sheet is also provided, which shows how the final table would look.
You can use this same process to add any type of information, not just geographical data. For example, if you have a query classification, you could use that to group queries into categories. Finally, the text explains how to connect your Google Sheets document to Data Studio.