Hi.
I'm Daniel Waisberg,
Search Advocate at Google,
and welcome to another Search Console Training episode.
Today, I'll discuss
how to export your Search Console data to spreadsheets
and give you some ideas on what to do with it.
One advantage of exporting the data
is that it allows you
to add more context to your reports.
You can enrich the data with any sources,
like technical or business information about your site.
Another advantage
is that it allows you to do more advanced analysis
using the data,
using statistical or data visualization tools.
♪ [music] ♪
Search Console provides you data
to help you understand your performance in Google Search,
but the tool is built for users
that work with many different types of websites,
so the charts provided in the tool
might not be exactly what you need
or maybe you need to prepare something
for others involved with the website,
maybe for the marketing team
or for a manager.
If that's the case,
you might want to set up a custom dashboard
with data visualizations
that are not supported by Search Console,
such as maps,
area charts, scatter plots,
pivot tables, or tree maps.
These might help you make better decisions
that are supported by data.
To make a custom dashboard,
you'll need to export your data.
Let's start with the easiest way
to export data from Search Console:
spreadsheets.
[electronic bleeps]
In most reports,
you'll find an
usually in the top-right corner.
In this example,
we're looking at the Search Performance report,
which I discussed in a previous episode of this series.
When you export data,
you can choose among three options:
Google Sheets,
Excel,
or CSV.
Click one of the options
to export the data in your preferred format.
Any filters applied to the current report
will also be applied to the data exported.
The export feature built into reports
allows you to export 1,000 rows of data.
For the performance report,
you get seven different tables
when you export the data
corresponding to the different tabs in the report
plus a
that list the filters
that were applied to the data exported,
such as the search type
and date range.
Different reports will have different tables,
so it's worth taking some time
to go over the information you can export.
[electronic bleeping]
Exporting data
can open many doors.
[door opening]
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
[door slamming]
Let's discuss two examples
showing how you might use this data
to make better decisions.
[electronic bleeping]
In the first example,
suppose you have a website
divided into multiple sections.
For instance,
if you have a bookstore,
you probably have sections for poetry, fiction,
sci-fi, arts, and so on.
This might or might not be visible
in the URL structure,
but usually, websites will be divided
into different directories.
In which case,
you would see
/fiction,/sci-fi,
If that's the case for you,
you might be interested in comparing these sections
for the metrics available at Search Console,
along with internal metrics your company has.
For example,
number of books available,
average book price,
and profit matrix.
[electronic bleeping]
The table you see
was created by exporting data
for our developer documentation
using the Search Console Performance report
and joining it with additional data.
Let me go through the process I used to create it.
Our developer documentation
has two main directories
called "docs" and "blog."
We want to compare views
between pages in those two directories.
If you use directories,
you can use the split function in Google Sheets
to break apart your pages by directories.
If you do not use directories
for your website sections,
you would need a table that shows for each page,
which section it belongs to.
This sheet
shows an example of such a table.
The Search Console export
provides performance stats on a page level,
including all the columns you see,
apart from the
To create a table
where you have both the performance data
and the sections,
you need to join the tables
using a VLOOKUP function.
To do so,
let's add a column to the
that we exported from the Performance report
and name it
The VLOOKUP function
finds the matching category
for each row in the
from the possible categories
listed in the
In other words,
you're joining the two tables
using the page as the key.
If you're not used to spreadsheet formulas,
it may look a bit daunting at first,
but you can remake the spreadsheet at any time,
so just try it out
and make sure to check out the links in the description
to learn more about Google Sheets.
[electronic bleeping]
In the second example,
suppose you're analyzing your Search Performance
for the countries that are most important to you.
This might help you evaluate your past budget
and decide where to concentrate your future SEO effort.
[electronic bleeping]
In this table,
I joined the Performance data
to the country budget and the region,
also using the VLOOKUP function,
just as I did in the previous example.
With this data,
you can analyze your regional SEO budget
and decide how to distribute it.
For example,
you could build a chart
showing the total budget
for each of the regions
and how much traffic you're getting from them.
You could also try and assess
how big an opportunity each market has
by looking at metrics like average position
and click-through rate.
This information
could help you distribute your budget
in a more informed way.
For example,
if you find out
that there is a significant opportunity
in a non-English market,
you could increase your website translation budget
for specific languages.
[electronic bleeping]
I hope you have a few of your own ideas
about exporting your data
out of Search Console.
In the next video,
we'll discuss ideas
on how to monitor your Search traffic
that can help you make your Search Performance data
more clear
and actionable.
Stay tuned.
♪ [music] ♪
Exporting data can open many doors.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
[horse snorting and galloping]
That's a horse. That's not a door.
[gasping]
That's better.