Our Site Audit tool allows you to integrate your website's Google Analytics data into a crawl, to gain unique insights and identify issues with traffic-driving pages.
Why Integrate Google Analytics with Site Audit?
Integrating Google Analytics data with the Site Audit tool allows you to further enrich reports, by being able to:
- Investigate non-indexable, redirected, and broken pages generating organic search traffic.
- Quickly identify orphaned pages getting organic search traffic.
- Use our 250 metrics with Google Analytics data to create customized reports.
To get these reports, Google Analytics needs to be added as a crawl source to a Site Audit project.
How To Set Up Google Analytics in Site Audit
1. Navigate to the Connected Apps page by clicking the user options in the top right of the screen and choosing ‘Connected apps’.
2. Click on the ‘+ Add account’ button.
3. Login to your Google Account which has the Google Analytics profiles you want to include.
4. In the Connected Apps page, you can manage which Google Accounts are connected in Site Audit.
5. Once a Google account is connected, navigate to the Sources settings (step 2) in the project you want to include Google Analytics data.
6. Choose the Analytics Source (a blue tick will appear when selected), and then click on Google Analytics 4 (or Google Analytics 3 if you are a GA 360 customer).
7. Select the Google Analytics property that you want to use in project crawls. You can use the internal search function to help find the right property if you have many.
Once you have selected a property, you can use the following filters to alter the URLs that Site Audit extracts:
- Date range: The default is 90 days, but you can also select from a number of preset values or just type your own custom value.
- Minimum sessions: This allows you to group data by the minimum number of organic search sessions to a page.
- Minimum page views: Set a minimum number of page views to exclude URLs without a lot of activity.
- Filter: The default here is organic search, but you can also select Google or Bing Organic Search Landing Pages, or All.
8. That’s it! Site Audit will now fetch URLs in the selected Google Analytics view during the crawl. You can now finalize any other settings and run or schedule the crawl.
Google Analytics Metrics Extracted
The following metrics are extracted from Google Analytics:
- Visits
Note: GA4 uses sessions rather than visits. In Site Audit, we have kept this as visits to avoid confusion and maintain uniformity within our platform.
- Page Load Time
- Pageviews per Visit
- Time On Page
API Limits
The Google Analytics Data API for GA4 has hourly and daily rate limits per GA4 property.
When a crawl is started, Site Audit will continue to make API requests for data until the daily limits are reached. When hourly limits are reached, Site Audit will pause the API requests until the next hour. For crawls with a large amount of data this may result in crawls taking longer to complete.
The amount of data can be reduced by limiting the date ranges or increasing the minimum number of Visits/Pageviews.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does Site Audit choose the protocol and hostname for the URLs in Google Analytics?
A: When the filter is All Pages, we use the pageLocation field in GA which captures the full URL. For all other filters based on landing pages, we combine the hostName and landingPagePlusQueryString fields in GA to generate the URL.
Q: How does Google Analytics work with Site Audit?
Google Analytics data can be added to a Site Audit crawl with the following steps:
- A client connects their Google account in Site Audit.
- The client then chooses the Google Analytics property they want to include in a crawl.
- Site Audit requests data from the Google Analytics API.
- Site Audit crawls URLs found in the Google Analytics data and saves certain metrics for each URL found in Google Analytics (see “Google Analytics metrics extracted” above) which are then available in reports.
Q: Why can't I see the Google Analytics profile I want to use in a crawl?
A: This is usually due to the Google Account which has been connected. If the Google Analytics profile has not been set up in the connected Google account, it will not appear in the list.
Q: How can the Google Analytics data be extracted?
A: The Google Analytics data can be extracted by visiting the Pages in Analytics report. All the Google Analytics data crawled by Site Audit can be exported to a CSV with metadata and other on-page SEO signals.
To visit the report in Site Audit simply go to the relevant project and input “Pages in Analytics” in the ‘Search reports’ bar in the top left corner of the screen. Alternatively, once in the relevant project, navigate to Source Gap and then Analytics, and ‘All Reports’.
Q: Is it possible to add multiple Google Accounts to Site Audit?
A: Yes, Site Audit allows multiple Google Accounts to be added. Also, any profiles in Google Analytics will be consolidated into one list in the Sources settings.
For example all the Google Analytics profiles under seo@gmail.com and marketing@gmail.com would be consolidated into one list in the Analytics Source settings in a project set up.
Q: Is it possible to add multiple Google Analytics properties to a single Site Audit project?
A: No. You can only attach a single Google Analytics property to a Site Audit project.
Q: Can Site Audit help with Google Analytics line limits in 360?
A: No, Site Audit will not help in this situation. Google Analytics API will still use the same sampling thresholds as in the UI. For more information around line limits and sampling thresholds please read the following guide.
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.