Use the GOV.UK Search Console data
This page is a work in progress.
Google Search Console provides data on searches that result in a page from www.gov.uk being displayed as part of the Google search results. This data can help you understand what terms users use to find content on GOV.UK, and how well certain pages perform on the search results page.
This page provides some guidance on how to use the GOV.UK Search Console data, stored in BigQuery.
More information on the data source itself can be found on the data source page.
Use the GOV.UK Search Console data in BigQuery
You can choose to access and query the Search Console data directly in BigQuery.
To do this, you will need access to view and query the data. All users who are granted permissions to access GOV.UK GA4 data are also granted permissions to access the Search Console data. GDS users will be able to run queries in a range of projects in BigQuery, such as the GA4 analytics project where the data is stored. Users from other organisations will need to query the data from a Google Cloud Platform project with billing owned by their organisation.
If you are new to BigQuery, you may find it helpful to review Google’s documentation explaining the BigQuery user interface.
Tables and fields
Information on the two Search Console tables can be found on the data source page.
Queries can be returned with null values if they are rare. In these cases, the ‘is_anonymized_query’ field should be marked with this bool.
The query field will be null when it is true to protect the privacy of users making the query. More information on this can be found in Google’s documentation on Search Console performance data filtering and limits.
Example query
For example, if you wanted to get a list of GOV.UK URLs with the search terms used to surface them, and the number of impressions and clicks these terms led to, you could query something like the following:
SELECT
url,
query,
impressions,
clicks,
FROM
`ga4-analytics-352613.searchconsole_wwwgovuk.searchdata_url_impression`
WHERE
data_date = "2024-01-01"
ORDER BY
clicks DESC,
impressions DESC
Use the GOV.UK Search Console data in Looker Studio
The Search Console data stored in BigQuery can be used in Looker Studio (and other reporting tools). To do this, you will need the ID of a Google Cloud Platform project with billing enabled that is owned by your organisation.
Connecting to the BigQuery data
If you are a member of GDS staff, please use the shared data connections.
If you are a member of another organsiation, we recommend you use a custom query to connect to BigQuery. You can do this in Looker Studio by:
- Clicking to add a data source
- In the ‘Connect to data’ panel, selecting ‘BigQuery’
- In the left-hand menu, selecting ‘Custom query’
- Entering your billing project ID
- Entering a query to select the fields needed using a WHERE statement to define the date range required (see example below)
- Tick the checkbox to ‘enable date range parameters’
- Selecting ‘Add’
An example of a SQL query that could be used in step 5 above is:
SELECT
*
FROM
`ga4-analytics-352613.searchconsole_wwwgovuk.searchdata_site_impression`
WHERE data_date BETWEEN PARSE_DATE("%Y%m%d", @DS_START_DATE) AND PARSE_DATE("%Y%m%d", @DS_END_DATE)
Using the data
Once the connection is set up, you should be able to see all the fields available, similar to how you would see and use any other dataset.