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 project 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 "Setup new Crawl" to go directly to the crawl settings page.
How to add Google Analytics as a data source
From the project home page, lick on "Add data sources" in the "Enrich your crawls" section under "Tasks."
Navigate to the "Google Analytics" tab and click "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 are 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.
How to activate the SEO Impact Report with Google Analytics
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.
Tick the "Enable Google Analytics cross-data analysis" box.
Now you will need to choose your Google Analytics account:
If you have already linked to it using one of the two methods above, you can click on the "Google Account" field to view a drop-down list of the known Google Accounts. Select yours.
If your account is not already listed in this menu, click the "Add Google Account" button.
This opens a pop-up window that allows you to connect to your account outside of OnCrawl. The only information we receive are 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 property
Choose the view. This should be the view for the domain that uses the default grouping in Google Analytics. You must have access to this view.
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:
Number of SEO (organic) visits
Pages receiving SEO (organic) visits
Bounce 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
And more…!
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.
Going further
If you still have questions, drop us a line at @oncrawl_cs or click on the Intercom button at the bottom right of your screen to start a chat with us.
Happy crawling!