In February, the team from Google Search Central (GSC) announced the exciting news of a feature launch that enables direct integration between GSC and BigQuery (BQ). This news was immediately welcomed by many, as the Search Console interface could only display data up to 16 months ago. But once you have linked your Search Console with BigQuery through this solution, the data remains stored in your data warehouse, allowing you to have the data at your fingertips for as long as you want. This Bulk Data Export opens the door to more easily build a data warehouse based on Search Console data, allowing you to combine this data more easily with other data sources. You can then transform and clean your data within your data warehouse to gain deeper insights into your data.
These new insights can be visualized using another Google tool, Looker Studio. With this tool, in combination with BigQuery, you can relatively easily visualize your results to dynamically display your Search performance in a dashboard. In this article, we first discuss what you can do with this connection, then why it might be interesting for your website, and finally what other connections are possible to more easily gain insights from your datasets.
Why Google Search Console?
If you're looking for a good overview of the key SEO (Search Engine Optimization) performance metrics, Google Search Console is the tool for you. Search Console provides useful insights that help you better understand how to improve your website's online visibility. The tool not only provides comprehensive reports on your search engine performance on relevant keywords, but it also identifies fruitful keywords where you could perform even better and thus easily gain profit. Moreover, it also offers useful insights about your domain in terms of technical performance and user experience.
Why is this interesting?
Collecting data according to privacy guidelines is becoming increasingly difficult. Moreover, it is important to ensure that you have as much control as possible over the data you can eventually collect. In a time where control over your data is becoming increasingly important, it is advisable to start building a data warehouse as soon as possible. The advantage is that this is becoming easier, as the possibilities for linking data sources and data warehouses continue to grow. This also applies to the connection between Google's BigQuery data warehouse and Google Search Console.
By linking different data streams within a central data warehouse, you maintain full control over your data and create a 'single source of truth' where all the data you collect speaks the same language. Within your data warehouse, you can easily build tables to merge more and more data sources. This creates a comprehensive overview of your performance across the various marketing-related areas of your company. This data can then be easily transformed within the BigQuery environment, allowing you to tell a clear story about performance over a certain period.
By improving integration between different sources, you streamline the entire process of analyzing your raw data to quickly draw concrete conclusions, which can then be used to set various action points. The scalability of Google BigQuery allows you to easily link more data sources within the data warehouse without having a significant impact on usage speed.
Why now?
The sunset of Universal Analytics is approaching. This makes it important to start building a data warehouse as soon as possible to preserve as much historical data as possible. It is also important to consider the increasing privacy requirements regarding data processing mentioned earlier. Fortunately, Google BigQuery not only offers a direct connection for Search Console, but there is also a direct connection possible from Google Analytics 4 with this data warehousing tool. This makes it possible to link two of your most important data sources to the same data warehouse with little effort. From here, it is possible to merge your data to create a cohesive story about your online performance.
Looker Studio
If you have difficulty transforming and interpreting your data in BigQuery, you can use another advantage of Google BigQuery: the easy integration with other Google products, such as Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio). Within Looker Studio, you have the ability to build a dynamic dashboard where you can assess the most important KPIs at a glance and set action points. This program offers a wide range of visualization options to build a beautiful interface. In the interface, you can choose the right data visualizations using scorecards, tables, and charts to display developments regarding KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) as clearly as possible. When you link BigQuery to your dashboard as the primary data source, your dashboard will hardly notice the high volumes of data flowing in the longer you let the dashboard run.
By linking the Search Console data to a dashboard via BigQuery, you can gain better insights into your performance regarding online visibility at a glance. The data from Search Console provides answers to questions such as: How often is your website displayed on Google? How often do people click through? Which keywords yield a high click-through rate? And are you being found on the keywords you want to be found on? This streamlines the entire decision-making process, from the initial question to identifying the bottleneck, to setting clear action points to improve your performance. After that, it's just a matter of waiting to see if the results change. Fortunately, this will be easy to monitor with the dynamic visualizations within Looker Studio.
