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(I hope I've got everything translated correctly, because our Google Analytics is in german. I'll write the german word after the translations, in case anyone speaks german and I've got the translations wrong.)

We have been looking at the SEO Content pages report (Akquisition > Suchmaschineneoptimierung -> Zielseiten) recently.

For some unknown reason we cannot edit that report, so we tried to create a new one with additional info. But Impressions and Clicks are not available in custom reports. Ok. Create a extra report with the additional fields and merge those two in Excel. Not nice but would work.

Our custom report has a filter for source/medium with value "google/organic" and "landing page" (Zielseite) as dimension. To our understanding that should be the same settings that the SEO Content pages report would be based on. We have "Entries" (Einstiege) as the first metric. Again that should somehow match to "Clicks" in the SEO report. But it does not. (a small difference would be no problem)

Given the same time period, we have really big differences. A page has 5 clicks in SEO report and 78 entries in the custom report. Another page has 35 clicks in SEO report and 18 entries in the custom report. So the difference is in both ways.

Why is that? Is our understanding of either source/medium "google/organic" or the SEO content pages report wrong? How can we explain these differences?

Is there a better/more correct way to get additional info to the SEO content pages report? We need the revenue value.

Any help is appreciated. Sebastian

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  • You cannot edit that report because the numbers are imported from webmaster tools/Google Search Console (actually you cannot "edit" any report, but I think you mean that you cannot create a custom report based on this report). I cannot help you there, but I can at least assure you that you are not alone with that problem. It has something do with the fact that the numbers are collected differently (via tracking code in GA and directly by Google from WMT), but one still feels that they should be somewhat similar. You cannot at all tie the 'SEO' reports to any other metric in GA.
    – Eike Pierstorff
    Commented May 28, 2015 at 9:18

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This is due to the data in Akquisition > Suchmaschineneoptimierung -> Zielseiten (or Accuisition > Search Engine Optimisation > Landing Page ) being pulled from Goole Webmaster Tools / Search Console account for the site and the data in your other report coming from Google Analytics's tracking, two different tracking methords.

Why are the numbers so out? Well Google explain why that could be here :

Search Console data may differ from the data displayed in other tools

However I have seen outrageous differences in data. For instance a site where many hundreds of pages are appearing as landing pages, yet these pages are set to noindex and are not indexed in Google, so couldn't have been the landing page from organic.

Apparently this happens due to people landing on a different page from search, then left the website and came back directly but to a different page not via search, which is still counted as an organic session.

How can pages which aren't indexed be reported as landing pages in Google Analytics?

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  • I do understand (better) that data differs between these two tracking methods. Even though the difference would normally make be belief that something is wrong. But I guess we jsut have to live with it.
    – Seb
    Commented May 28, 2015 at 12:10

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