Daniel Waisberg and Mariya Moeva discuss tools content creators can use to understand monetized websites better. Tune into the video to learn more about the capabilities of Google Search Console, Google Analytics, AdSense, Ad Manager, and more to understand and improve your website’s performance.
Video Transcript
Daniel Waisberg: Hi, I’m Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google. In this video, I’ll talk about– Excuse me, sir. I think you’re in the wrong series. But I received a special invitation. It’s all right, Monetized. Daniel is our special guest in this episode, in which we’ll talk about tools for publishers and… Of course, we have to talk about Search Console. We definitely do. Before diving in, some introductions.
Aurora: I’m Aurora. I work in Policy Education for Publishers at Google. Daniel, meet Monetized and Organica. As I was saying, in this episode, we’ll talk about what tools can content creators and content managers use to benefit their monetized websites. And how to use them together to succeed on Search and the web in general. For that, we’ll need to roll our sleeves and get our hands dirty with data, but nothing to be scared about.
Let me start by saying… There are many Google tools you can use to monitor and optimize different aspects of your website. Knowing what each does and how to use them together will help you better understand your site from the organic and the monetized angles alike.
Using Search Console
Let’s start with Search Console. Daniel, I thought you had already said every possible thing about Search Console on your Search Console training series. I thought so, too, but as you can imagine, the team works really hard to continuously improve the product with new capabilities. We can’t forget the older reports, too. They’ve been around for so long for a good reason.
As Brazilians say, [Portuguese] Panela velha é que faz comida boa.
♪ [music] ♪
The gentleman means that old saucepans make the best food. Don’t look so surprised. I know some Portuguese, too. Mr. Waisberg, would you be so kind as to discuss these new and old capabilities for publishers to make the most out of Search Console?
[Spanish] Por supuesto. I’ll start with the most helpful reports to publishers in general. Then I’ll focus on a report that will be particularly relevant to news publishers. If you publish content on the web, you want to be sure Google can crawl, index, and serve your pages to users. Search Console will inform you of issues Google found in your website with regards to all three of these processes.
Remember, you will have to verify your website ownership in Search Console to be able to see the reports Daniel is going to tell you about. Check the links in the description to learn all the ways to verify your website in Search Console.
Index Coverage Report
The best place to start is the Index Coverage Report. Here, you’ll find information about all the pages Google has access to on your website. By default, you’ll see a list of errors that prevented your pages to be shown on search results. If you click a row in the table, You can find more details about the issue, sample URLs, and the process to validate a fix you’ve implemented.
Taking Advantage of Rich Results
How about rich results? I’m very interested in them. Monetized, before you get any ideas, rich results are simply a way for websites to enhance their search result appearances. That’s why we call them “rich.” However, while they will not affect website monetization directly, they could actually increase how often users click through to your pages, which would in turn increase your organic traffic. In order to take advantage of rich results, you’ll need to implement structured data, which is simply an HTML markup that provides Google with more information about your pages.
For example, if you publish recipes or how-to guides, you can implement structured data to be eligible for rich results. Check out the Search Gallery to learn what are the options available to you. How will I know if I implemented my structured data correctly on my site? You’ll find information about your implementation on the Search Console Rich Results Status Report. You can check the pages where Google recognized the markup and whether it found any structured data issues. Daniel, don’t forget about the Search Performance Report. I wasn’t going to!
Search Performance Report
The Search Performance Report helps you monitor the trends on how your website is performing on Google Search. For example, you will find what queries people use to find your site, pages where they landed, countries they accessed your content from, devices used to access your site, and rich results you’ve appeared on. This report is very insightful for publishers to learn what is working and what is not when it comes to bringing organic traffic to your website. For example, if you don’t find specific queries that you would expect, maybe you don’t have enough content about that topic.
Google News Performance Reports
If I remember correctly, you mentioned you had something in particular for news sites. Are there any reports that can bring them specialized insights? Apart from the ones I already mentioned, there is another report that will be especially useful for news organizations: the Google News Performance Report. It is similar to the Search Performance Report, but it provides data from the Google News apps on Android and iOS as well as the news.google.com website. There’s some interesting info in there, so make sure to check it out. If you want to learn more about Search Console, check out Daniel’s series on this channel.
AdSense, Ad Manager, and AdMob Policy Center
On the monetized side, an essential tool is the AdSense, Ad Manager, and AdMob Policy Center. It helps you identify and resolve issues that affect ad serving to your account, which could include those involving your content, crawler access, or regulations, among other factors. This tool will warn you if we detect that your pages, sections, sites, or apps have policies or other issues that prevent you from fully monetizing them. At a glance, you’ll be able to see how many of them are affected by issues and what percentage of your ad requests are disabled or restricted due to policy violations.
There are useful filters that will help you prioritize what issues to fix– among other parameters. You can arrange issues by ad serving status or impact numbers. If you prefer to organize data in your own way, you can download it as a CSV file. If you monetize your content with Google AdSense, Ad Manager, or AdMob, you should have access to the Policy Center through your account. To learn more about this tool, check out the series Inside the Policy Center link in the description.
Google Analytics
If you’re creating and monetizing content, Search Console and the Policy Center are really useful tools to monitor the health of your website, but there are other Google tools you can use on top of that. Many publishers use Google Analytics, which provides valuable insights into how users behave in websites.
To make things even more interesting, if you monetize your website with AdSense or Ad Manager, you can link it to Google Analytics. This will help you identify which traffic sources, countries, pages, and other segments bring the highest value users to your website, enabling a data-driven approach to optimizing your AdSense revenue. Here are three things you can do right away: find which content type and topics generate the highest revenue and create content based on this data; understand which page templates bring the best results and design your website based on revenue metrics, and analyze which users have the best CTR and revenue metrics to make sure you’re targeting the right audience.
We briefly talked about Google Trends in Episode 2. It gives you access to a sample of actual queries users search on Google. The data shows search interest in topics from around the globe or down to city level.
Here are two ideas on how to use this data. 1) Check top queries in your region and compare them to the queries you’re getting traffic from– the ones Daniel just mentioned. If there are queries missing from your traffic, see if you have content on that subject. 2) Related queries to topics you’re interested in. This may surface rising queries and help you prepare your site for them- for example, by adding content related to it. Try it out by visiting trends.google.com. It’s pretty fun and insightful.
Site Kit
Site Kit is another way of using Search Console. Hmm. Yes and no. Actually, I just happen to have the Site Kit Product Manager, Mariya Moeva, here. Mariya, is this the case?
Mariya Moeva: Not quite, but nice try, Daniel. If you create your site with WordPress, Site Kit can help you gather insights about how people find and use your site and how to improve and monetize your content. It brings the best of Google products to WordPress, like AdSense, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager, Optimize, and, of course, also Search Console. How does it do this? First, it will ask you what your site goals are, and then it will help you get there. When you choose which Google products you want to connect, it will place the tags directly on your site on your behalf, so you don’t need to know how to edit the code of your site; provides you with easy-to-understand metrics and actionable insights directly on your WordPress dashboard. If you create your site with WordPress, and you have both Search Console and Site Kit, you might be asking yourself like Daniel: Why and when should I use these different tools?
The main benefit of Site Kit is that we’ll give you an overview of how you’re doing in several tools at a glance. It helps you connect existing Google product accounts or create new ones in a couple of clicks, so you can see the most important metrics from each tool, directly on your site. If you’re busy, or you don’t want to spend time on complex reports and multiple tools, Site Kit could be a great solution to achieve your goals. Thanks, Mariya. Also, make sure you keep up to date with new tools, and then you give them a try.
Conclusion
We hope this episode helped you better understand what tools are available to you when creating, managing, and monetizing content. And that you see the benefits of using them to monitor your site’s health. After all, the better data you have about your site, the more informed decisions you’ll be able to make.
Daniel, thanks so much for joining us in this episode and sharing your knowledge. In the next episode, will cover penalties and the steps you need to take to resolve them. Don’t forget to like and share this video and subscribe to this channel so that you don’t miss anything. [Daniel] Stay tuned.
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