You can connect your Google Analytics account in Oncrawl. This allows you to do two important things:
Validate your account: this is one way to show us that you own the site you're crawling, and gives you the right to bypass current site settings by increasing the crawl speed and using a virtual robots.txt file to replace the real one during a crawl.
Add cross-analysis between crawl data and analytics data in the SEO Impact Report. This ties crawl data to real-word data on user behavior.
How to validate your account
If you're not sure whether you've already validated your project or not, you can follow steps one and two below. If your project is already validated, we'll let you know on the project validation page.
From your Projects home page (or any other page in the project), in the upper right-hand corner, click on the three dots to open the project menu.
Select Verify ownership
Choose Google Analytics and follow the steps to provide the information we need to validate your project.
Click on Set up a new crawl to go directly to the crawl settings page.
How to add Google Analytics as a data source
From the project home page, click on Add data sources located next to the Tasks panel.
Navigate to the Google Analytics tab and cross Add connected app. You will have the possibility to choose between UA account and GA4 account. UA accounts will not collect or provide current data after June 30th, 2023. Crawls using UA data sources but containing no data in the last 45 days (mid-August, 2023) will not run.
This opens the Set up a Google Analytics data source window.
The first thing to do is create a connection with your Google Analytics account by clicking on Add Google Account.
This opens a pop-up window that allows you to connect to your account outside of Oncrawl. The only information we receive is the data your account shares with us after you've provided your login credentials.
This means that you must authorize pop-ups in the Oncrawl app in order to connect your Google Analytics account.
Indicate that you agree to share your Google Analytics data with Oncrawl.
Once this action has been completed, you can select the Google Account you have linked with Oncrawl.
Next, define the scope of your data source :
for GA4 account, you will have to select Properties AND then Data streams. Only web data streams appear in Oncrawl.
If you don't have a GA4 account yet, you will have to have to set one up before creating a data source in Oncrawl based on GA4 data.
Your data source is ready to be used in a crawl profile within your project.
How to activate the SEO Impact Report with Google Analytics to add analytics data to a crawl
When setting up a crawl, in the crawl settings:
Scroll down to the Analysis section.
Click on the SEO impact report tab to expand it.
Select the Enable Google Analytics cross-data analysis box.
If you have previously set up a Google Analytics Universal Analytics account, you may see a Migrate to GA4 button in this section. To use a GA4 data source, click on it to update the type of data source used in your crawl profile. This change is immediate.
Now you will need to choose a data source:
If you have already linked to it using the method above, you can click on the Data source field to view a drop-down list of the known data sources. Select yours.
If your data source is not already listed in this menu, click the Add a new source button. This opens a pop-up window that allows you to connect to your Google account outside of Oncrawl. The only information we receive is the data your account shares with us after you've provided your login credentials.This means that you must authorize pop-ups in the Oncrawl app in order to connect your Google Analytics account.
Indicate the analytics data to be analyzed:
Choose the analytics account.
Choose the type GA4.
Choose the property from the properties shared by the data source.
Choose the data stream for GA4. This should be the web data stream configured in your Google Analytics account.
A message at the bottom of this section will confirm that our crawler has access to your data. If there's a problem, we'll let you know here.
Now you can go ahead and launch your crawl.
Advantages of Google Analytics + SEO Impact Report
What types of analytics data does Oncrawl use?
Analytics data is data concerning the type and volume of user visits, as well as user behavior on a website.
When interfacing with Google Analytics, Oncrawl principally draws from information concerning:
For Universal Analytics :
Number of SEO (organic) sessions
Landing pages receiving SEO (organic) traffic
Bounce rates
For GA4 :
Number of SEO (organic) sessions
Pages receiving SEO (organic) traffic
Engagement rates
This data is available in Google Analytics and in Oncrawl.
Oncrawl displays the data for the last 45 days.
What type of analysis does Oncrawl show?
Oncrawl provides you with the metrics to examine the relationship between various aspects of organic activity and many technical standards, including:
The breakdown of pages by page groups
Page depth
Internal page popularity
Internal links
Title, description, and h1 tags
Word count
Distribution of duplicate content
Load time
Status code
This cross-analysis allow you to determine the metrics that have the most impact on your site, and the optimizations that can make the most difference for SEO traffic on your site.
More information is provided in the article about GA4 metrics in Oncrawl.