Google Webmaster Tools

Google upgraded their Webmaster Tools

Google continues to enhance their toolset to give those of us who are professionals in the SEO and Web world, more data. Feed me data! They recently launched a new version of the Webmaster Tools which gives you more data from the back end, which complements Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is great at giving you data on what happens when a visitor clicks through to your Web site, no matter where they came from. In the past, the Webmaster Tools gave us a little information about what people saw when users didn’t click though to you – valuable data too.

But with the new Webmaster Tools, you’ll get a new insight into what’s going on from the search engine perspective, even before your visitors click through to your Web site.

If you haven’t registered your Web site with the Webmaster Tools, you must do so first, in order to get any data.

Segment Data Based on Country

If your business gets traffic from different parts of the world, it’s likely that search results and interactions are going to be different. Click the dropdown choice that shows “All Countries”. You can pick a specific country, and the data and graph will change to reflect the searches that are specific to that country.

Impressions and Clickthrough Rate

In the old version of the Webmaster Tools, you could see some basic data about where your Web site showed up in the searches. Now, however, they give you impressions (the number of times your page actually showed up), how many clicks that term got, and the clickthrough rate as a percentage.

Even more exciting is the ability to click the “plus” symbol to expand out more data. They give you the specific pages that show up for a search term, the position number, and again, clickthrough rate.

The graph at the top of the page gives you the impressions compared to clickthrough rate over time. By hovering over a data point, you get a pop up bubble that shows the actual data of that specific point.

Additional Data Insight

The important point of all this is that it’s data about your Web site that Google Analytics doesn’t give you. It’s fantastic to know what people are doing once they arrive at your Web’s doorstep, but to know which pages people are wandering by without coming in the door is gold.