Webmaster Tools Integrate Google Analytics Data

What's New?

From the beginning of February, webmasters started to notice some changes to their Google Webmaster Tools accounts. The ability to link to corresponding Google Analytics accounts from the webmaster console has been largely welcomed by users across the board, and is generally thought to be the first of a series of improved interconnectivity between the two sites.

The announcement was made last Monday via the Webmaster Central Blog, but was picked up on by observant webmasters prior to this post.

Currently, it is only possible to access referral traffic produced by Google Analytics via the Webmaster links section of the respective account, as well as link directly to the corresponding Analytics account dashboard from a Webmaster Tools profile.

To link a GWT profile to a GA account, click on the appropriate 'manage' icon at the right side of the list of accounts and you will see a Google Analytics profile option: this will take you through to a list of your Google Analytics accounts. All that is then left to do is to select the desired GA account to link to and save.

The Benefits

The move towards an integrated profile for a website is an attractive one to webmasters, and while the changes made so far will not have a huge impact on the way users operate, it is most definitely a sign of things to come.

At the very least, this addition provides a greater ease of access between GWT and GA, which in turn offers a more robust analysis of traffic and linking trends.

Still To Come

The prospect of a deeply integrated, one-stop-shop for webmasters and SEO's will be given fresh hope by this recent development. For instance, the inclusion of additional metrics such as bounce rate, and an overview of top keyword and content performance would provide a greater understanding of site performance.

Another future development may be the ability to draw in data from the GWT accounts to the synchronised GA profiles. Data contained within the Diagnostics section such as crawl errors, crawl stats, and HTML suggestions would be welcome additions to the GA dashboard.

At the moment, whilst access to GA from GWT has been enabled, reciprocal access from Analytics is not yet on offer. This may be the future of data reporting using Google tools; a complete integration of the most commonly used products in one place.