Near the beginning of June I signed up for the Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics integration pilot. Today I got an email telling me I could now integrate Google Webmaster Tools into my Analytics, so I thought I would share with you some of the features.

Setting It Up
Setting up was relatively straightforward, I just followed the instructions they sent me in the email. Basically you sign into the new version of Google Analytics and go to the Traffic Sources section, here you will see this:

Search Engine Optimization! How cool is that? Perhaps Google are going to start making our lives a little easier…

Anyways, once you click on that you have to link it to a profile in Google Webmaster Tools (obviously the site has to be already verified in GWT, but this is relatively straightforward and if you’re reading this blog you probably would have done this already anyways). Then once it is setup they have 3 reports you can play with:

1. Summary – which shows you impressions, clicks and CTR by Country or Google Property
2. Queries – which shows you impressions, clicks and CTR by keyword (can also add a secondary property like Country or Google Property)
3. Landing Pages – which shows you impressions, clicks and CTR for each landing page (again you can sort by Country and Google Property as well).

Here are a number of things I have noticed straight away that would benefit SEO’s:

Analysing CTR by landing page
This is one of the key benefits in my opinion. Looking down this list I can see the homepage and the page on duplicate content don’t have a click through rate as high as the other two pages.

This could just be because of the keywords the pages rank for, but it could be that my title tag and meta description aren’t that good when it comes to encouraging people to visit my site from Google. Looking at the snippet for the dupe content page, I can see that there is no meta description and it makes the listing much smaller and less appealing, no doubt leading to a lower CTR:

Now at this point I’ve kind of hit a brick wall – there doesn’t seem to be any way I can integrate the information I have in the SEO reports section with the other analytics. Maybe they will integrate this with time, who knows? At the moment it’s just the same as having it in Google Webmasters Tools except you don’t have to click about as much, so I guess it’s just more convenient. If they can improve it even more and integrate it better I’d be even more impressed!