Google Search Console

Connect the Parse.ly Dashboard with Google Search Console (GSC) to include search performance data alongside content performance data. View Google Search Keywords, Google Discover, and Google News data right in the Dashboard, eliminating the need to log in separately to GSC.

Use cases for GSC data

• Identify the top search keywords bringing traffic to your content.
• Identify the search keywords that your content isn’t delivering well on and adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.
• See which posts are showing up in Google Discover and bringing traffic to your site. If this looks to be a trend over time, you can begin to make sense of the kind of content from your site that Google tends to show in Discover.

Where to find GSC data

After integrating GSC, keyword data will appear in the Dashboard. To view this data, click on Google Search Console in the sources menu of the navigation bar. GSC data is only available on an individual site view.

You may also access GSC data from the referrers page. Click the “View Google Keywords” button.

This will open the referrer details page for Google, where Google Search Keywords, Google Discover, and Google News data can be explored.

The referrer details page for Google can also be accessed by clicking “google” from the list of individual referrers on Referrers.

GSC data is also found on post details pages. And Google Search Keywords and Discover data can be included on the Overview tab.

This data is also available through the Parse.ly Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

Definitions

Google Search Console data has four metrics:

• Impressions: How often someone saw a link to your site on Google. Generally, an impression is counted whenever an item appears in the current page of results, whether or not the item is scrolled into view, as long as the user need not click to see more results. Exceptions are when there are expandable sections like FAQs, results carousels, or infinite scrolling, like Discover cards or image searches. Those items must be scrolled or expanded by a click. Scrolling away and back or clicking away and back during a single session does not count as multiple impressions.
• Clicks: How often someone clicked a link from Google to your site. Clicking a search result to an outside page, returning, then clicking the same link again counts as only one click.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The calculation of (clicks ÷ impressions). A CTR in position 1 averages around 30%.
• Average position: A relative average ranking of the position of your link on a Google search result listing, where 1 is the topmost position. You want to rank as highly as possible. This is an average number, since the position of the link will be different each time it is seen. A link must get an impression for its position to be recorded.

Google Discover and Google News have results for impressions, clicks and CTR. Stories are not ranked on either of these platforms. Click, impression, and position data are attributed to the canonical URL of the link.

Google provides further explanations in these Help Center articles:

•  What are impressions, position, and clicks?
•  Performance report (Search results): About the data