The Analytics Edge GSC Warehouse brings Google Search Console data to your desktop. This article explains what that does for you.
Search Console Has Limits
While the Google Search Console (GSC) web interface is nice for casual monitoring, most SEO professionals and technical marketers are forced into other tools for advanced data exploration. The most common complaints about the GSC Search Analytics interface are:
- the 1000 row limit
- rigid filtering
- data sampling and anonymized queries
- the lack of unique count metrics
- a 16-month historical limit
Taking It Local
You don’t need a database server: Google can dump the data to BigQuery, so people assume search data requires a massive database, but all that data can fit into a file smaller than a downloaded movie. The key: a high-performance desktop database like DuckDb. With columnar storage and vectorized execution, it can easily query millions of rows of data in milliseconds.
Download the data: Leveraging the Analytics Edge connector technology, we can easily download the data from the API or from BigQuery. While 16 months of daily data can take a bit of time, daily updates would be fast and easily scheduled to happen overnight. You don’t have to worry about the details; the data engineering is built-in.
Multi-property, multi-client: load related properties or domains into a single ‘client’ database for consolidated reporting. Keep unrelated ‘clients’ in separate databases to isolate their data and make management easier.
Cleaning the data: to make the data truly useful, you need to ‘cleanse’ it. While keeping the raw page and query terms, we lowercase and strip non-printable characters, strip common tracking parameters and put the rest in alphabetical order. This helps to consolidate like terms and provide more accurate aggregations. To ease reporting, we also split the url into site, page and folder fields.
Backups required: To avoid possible data corruption due to network problems, the database must be on a local drive, and that makes it susceptible to failure or loss. So we build-in automatic backup, which could be a network or cloud service.
Team usage: Having that backup on a network share makes it possible to share the data with team members. The files can be opened read-only so there is no risk of data corruption. One computer syncs the data, everyone else has access.
The data is yours to keep: The database files are open and accessible from other tools. The schema is kept simple to facilitate reporting. The Analytics Edge GSC Warehouse uses a perpetual license – yours forever.
Interactive Data Exploration
The basics: Start with the familiar chart and table layout. Add a date range selection and metric totals. Click the metrics, see the chart and table update. Allow date range comparisons, with the chart showing both lines and the table including a previous and delta column for each metric.
Multi-dimensional: From a list of dimensions available, select the ones you want and the table updates instantly. For example, see the page and query together. Add in the country and device.
Nothing missing: Show rows for anonymous queries (empty fields), unknown countries and missing device types so nothing is hidden. Totals are always accurate.
Interactive filtering: Click on a value in the table to filter; a page, a folder, a query. Click on a metric to filter; greater than or equal to the value you clicked (less than or equal to for position metrics). Drag across the chart to zoom into a specific date range. Click on an empty query field to remove anonymous queries.
Advanced filtering: Open the filter panel to edit your filters or build a new one. Combine multiple conditions with and / or logic. Use Groups to build combinations like: (country_code contains ‘usa’ and folder not contains ‘us’) or (country_code not contains ‘usa’ and folder contains ‘us’).
Unlimited export: Let the user copy-to-clipboard or export to csv file at any time; from the chart or the table. No row limits, no waiting; click-click copy-paste without losing your train of thought.
Your Data, Your Computer, Your Analysis
With your data in a highly interactive data exploration tool, you can add a dimension and click-to-filter to instantly answer the questions in your mind, which leads to asking more questions and a better understanding of the data. You no longer restrict yourself to top-level metrics and one-dimension summaries because that is all you have time for.
Analytics Edge GSC Warehouse: the desktop alternative to GSC’s web interface.