The Google Search Console connection brings into KO what the website tracker cannot see: which queries Google showed your pages for, at what position, and how many impressions never became a click. The tracker answers “how many people came from search”; the console answers “why not more”.
One connection carries one Search Console property. A second website means a second connection.
Set up the connection in KO
- In Connects, click Add connect….
- In the Statistics and Analytics category, choose Google Search Console and click Connect.
- In 1. Connection, click Connect and sign in to the Google account that has access to the website in Search Console. KO asks for read-only access.
- Check Connected user: it shows the Google account the connection works on behalf of.
- In 2. Property, choose the website in the Property field. A domain property is marked ”— domain property”: it covers the whole website, with all subdomains and protocols.
Set up Google Search Console
Nothing needs to be switched on in the console itself. One thing matters: the account from step 2 must see the property.
- The website is added to Search Console as a property, and ownership is verified.
- The account is the property owner, or a user with full or restricted access. Properties without verified access do not appear in the Property list: Google does not return data for them.
If a colleague set up the property, ask them to add your account under Settings → Users and permissions, or connect under their account.
Read search in a report
Search console metrics are grouped under Search — the same as for Bing Webmaster Tools:
- Search impressions — how many times the website’s pages appeared in Google results;
- Search clicks — clicks from the results to the website;
- Search CTR — clicks divided by impressions;
- Average position — position in the results, weighted by impressions: a page with a thousand impressions weighs more than a page with one. Lower is better.
To see the queries, add a Breakdown section to a report and
choose the Search query field. The field exists only in projects with a Search Console or Bing
Webmaster Tools connection. The same metrics break down by Page path, Country and Device
type, and the Source field separates Google (google) from Bing (bing).
The first update loads the last 30 days; older history is not loaded. It runs in steps of ten days, so a month is collected over several updates rather than in one. KO re-reads the last five days on every update: the console keeps adding to them for two or three days, so the latest days in a report can grow.
Watch for pages that dropped out of search
Once the connection brings data, a check appears in Diagnostics, on the Website panel, for the property’s domain. Once a day it compares the last week with the four weeks before it and looks for pages that used to show up in search steadily but got no impressions during the week. “Steadily” means at least ten impressions across at least three separate days: a single impression on a random query does not count as being present in the results.
The weeks are counted from the last day the console sent data for, not from today: the console reports a day two or three days late, and otherwise that delay would read as the whole website disappearing at once.
- OK — no such pages; the text says how many pages were shown during the week.
- Warning — the dropped pages are named in the text (the first three, with impressions over the previous four weeks in brackets); the Measure column shows how many there are in total.
- Error — no impressions are left at all: there were some over the previous four weeks and none during the last week. That is about the whole website, not one page.
- Note — there is nothing to check against: there is no connection, the console never sent impressions for the domain, or it has sent nothing for more than five days.
If the website is not opening at the same time, the check says so: start with availability, not with search.
Turn the connection on
Switch the connection status to Active. Active becomes available once a property is chosen.
- Active — everything works.
- Setting up — everything works, but data updates are paused.
- Archived — the connection is off; data and statistics are kept.
- Delete — removes the connection’s data and statistics.
Data updates only run in Active, so a connection left in Setting up stays silently empty.
Check that data is coming in
- Connected user shows the Google account you signed in with.
- The Property list contains your website. An empty list with the note “This account has no Search Console properties with verified access.” means the account sees no property at all: go back to Set up Google Search Console.
- After the next update, a Breakdown section by Search query shows queries with impressions for recent days.
- In Diagnostics, on the Connections panel, the connection shows “Data is syncing”. The line “No site selected. Select it in the connection settings, otherwise no data is loaded” means nothing is selected in Property; any other text names the reason loading stopped.
If it doesn’t add up
More impressions than in the Search Console summary. KO counts impressions per page: two pages of the website in one result are two impressions. The console’s property summary counts them as one. It is a different unit of counting, not a loading error.
Search clicks don’t match visits from Google in a report. Google counts the click, the website tracker counts the visit, and they are different facts: a click on a result does not have to end in a loaded page with the tracker on it. Don’t add them into one number; put them side by side.
The connection stopped updating. Connection status says the connection stopped working and the account needs to be connected again: Google no longer lets KO read the data — for example, access was revoked in the Google account settings. Click Connect and sign in again with the same account.
Diagnostics calls a working page dropped. The check sees impressions only and does not know a URL moved: after a redirect to a new URL, impressions go there. Open the old URL — if it redirects, the page did not drop out, it moved.