Reporting tool docs.

01What the report shows

The report answers two questions about a website on one page: how do people find it (Search Console) and what do they do once they arrive (Google Analytics). Search Console is the spine; every property has it. Analytics is optional and sits below the search numbers.

Everything refreshes every night. Sync now refreshes on demand, and the page always says when its numbers were fetched. The same page prints to a PDF for a client or a manager.

02Your first report, step by step

About ten minutes when the site already has a Search Console property. You need a Google account that can read the site's Search Console property and, for the second half, its GA4 property. They can be different accounts.

1. 01

   Create a free account and sign in

   Create an account with an email address and a password, then sign in. Nothing is connected yet.

2. 02

   Open Statistics

   From the admin overview, open Statistics. With nothing connected it shows one card: Connect Search Console.

3. 03

   Connect Search Console

   Press Connect Search Console. Google asks you to sign in and to allow read-only access to Search Console. Allow it. You come back to the dashboard with a toast confirming the account.

4. 04

   Pick the property

   The dashboard lists every property that account can see. Pick the site. If the site is not in Search Console yet, the dashboard creates a property and walks you through proving you own it (section 03). The first sync runs as soon as a verified property is picked; on a site with history you see 28 days of numbers right away.

5. 05

   Add Analytics (optional)

   Below the search numbers, under Add to this report, press Connect Google Analytics. Allow read-only access, pick the GA4 property, then tick the events to count and give each row a name (sections 04 and 05). Save, and the rows appear in the report on the next sync, which the dashboard runs for you.

6. 06

   Read the report

   Tiles first (clicks, impressions, CTR, average position), then the trend, the pages Google shows, index coverage, and your Analytics rows. Section 07 explains what each number means and the two traps in it.

7. 07

   Download the PDF

   Download PDF opens the print dialog; choose Save as PDF. Forward it as it is. Section 08 covers the monthly reminder.

03Connecting Search Console

Sign in with the Google account that owns the site's Search Console property, or should own it. If the account already has properties, you pick one; if not, the dashboard creates one and walks you through proving ownership. Two property types exist, and the difference is how ownership is proved:

Once verified, every sync stores daily clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for the last 95 days (so three full months are available at once), the pages that appeared in search over the last 28 days, and the indexing status of the pages in your sitemap. A brand-new property starts from zero, and Google begins collecting from the day it exists; the first useful report is about a week later.

04What GA4 key events are

Google Analytics 4 records events: page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, file downloads, and anything your site sends on purpose, such as contact_form_submit or call_click. A key event is an event you have marked as important to the business. GA4 called these conversions until March 2024; the mechanism did not change, only the name.

Marking an event as a key event does not change how it is collected. It tells GA4 which events count as results, so they show up in the key events reports, can be compared by channel (did organic search or paid ads produce the enquiries?), and can be used for ad bidding. To mark one: Admin → Data display → Events, then switch on Mark as key event next to the event. GA4 only offers the switch once it has seen the event fire at least once, so send a test submission first.

The reporting tool does not read the key-event flag; it reads events and their counts, and you choose which ones go in the report. Our advice: pick exactly the events you have marked as key events in GA4. Then the row in this report and the key events report in GA4 say the same thing, and whoever reads the PDF next to GA4 is not reconciling two numbers.

05Connecting Analytics and choosing rows

Connect the Google account that can read the site's GA4 property (it does not have to be the Search Console account), pick the property, then choose what the report should count. The tool lists every event the property recorded in the last 90 days, with counts, so you pick from what actually fires rather than guessing names.

Rows are yours to shape: one event makes a plain count, and up to four events tick together into one combined line (two call buttons become a single “Calls” row). Every row gets a display name in your words, because clients read “Calls”, not call_click_header. The limits are six rows per property and four events per row, and an event can sit in only one row: the same event under two labels makes a report whose lines cannot be added up, and someone always adds them up.

Counts are stored per event, so renaming a row or splitting a combined row later needs no re-sync. Two things to avoid: GA4's umbrella events (a site-wide contact event that fires for both forms double-counts one of them), and the (other) bucket GA4 emits past its event-name limit, which the picker hides because it cannot be re-queried.

06Setting up events (for developers)

The report can only count what GA4 records, so the site needs an event per action worth counting: a contact-form submission, a job application, a tap on the phone number. Event names must match [A-Za-z0-9_], up to 40 characters; anything else cannot be stored or re-queried.

With gtag.js, fire an event directly:

gtag('event', 'call_click', {});

With Google Tag Manager, push to the data layer and forward it with a GA4 Event tag:

dataLayer.push({ event: 'caregiver_form_submit' });

Name events by what happened, not where. call_click_header and call_click_footer can always be combined into one “Calls” row later, but one vague click event can never be split. WordPress sites using Contact Form 7 or similar can fire these from the form's submit hook or a GTM trigger on the success message. Once the event has fired once, mark it as a key event in GA4 (section 04), and it is ready to be picked here.

07Reading the numbers

Last 28 days is the headline view, compared with the 28 days before it. The chips above the tiles switch to the current month so far and to each of the last three full months. A full month is compared with the month before; the month in progress is compared with the whole previous month, and each tile also shows the same days of last month, so early in a month the deltas read low by construction and the labels say so.

Two traps. Average position is averaged across every query the site appears for, so when a site starts showing up for many new searches in low positions, the average gets worse while clicks go up; rising clicks next to a falling position number is growth. And pages seen in search counts every URL with an impression, which on a WordPress site with tag, author and translated pages is often larger than the sitemap; indexed pages counts only the sitemap URLs Google confirms as indexed. Both numbers are honest; they answer different questions.

Index coverage is checked through Google's URL Inspection API, 20 pages a night, stalest first, so a 200-page site is fully covered in about ten nights and then kept fresh. The tile shows how far that first pass has got.

08The PDF and the monthly reminder

Download PDF uses your browser's print-to-PDF. Choose “Save as PDF” in the dialog. The PDF is the dashboard itself, restyled for paper: a masthead naming the property and date range, the tiles, the trend, the pages and index coverage, and your Analytics rows. Connect buttons, menus and the row builder are left out. What you see on screen is exactly what the PDF says.

On the first of each month a card appears above the report: your previous month's report is ready to send. Its Download PDF opens last month's view and the print dialog in one go. Remind me next month hides it until the next first. The reminder is remembered per browser.

09How and when data refreshes

Every connected property syncs once a night, around midnight New York time. A sync fetches the daily search rows, the pages seen in search, the next batch of index checks, and the Analytics counts. Sync now does the same on demand and takes 20 to 40 seconds on a 200-page site. The status row shows when the last sync ran; if the nightly one did not run, the page says “Showing your last sync” rather than passing old numbers off as fresh.

Google reports search data with a delay of about two days, so the newest days are empty until Google publishes them, and GA4 reports through yesterday in the property's own time zone. The 28-day window is anchored to the newest stored day, not to the clock, so a New York property never quietly becomes a 27-day report in the evening.

10Access and your data

Both Google connections are read-only, granted through Google's own sign-in, and separate: declining Analytics cannot break search reporting. OAuth tokens are stored server-side and used only to fetch the numbers on your report; nothing is sold, shared, or used for advertising or AI training. Revoke access any time, with Disconnect in the dashboard, or from your Google account at myaccount.google.com/permissions. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

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