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Thanks, but the explanation still doesn't quite make sense because the discrepancy occurs for historical months in the downloaded data. So even if the CSV only downloads (for example) the top 1000 landing pages, it doesn't explain why the same download showed different data later. The top 1000 landing pages in that period should not have changed.

Anyway I think we will start using the API to extract the data in future as this seems to be more reliable regardless, so thanks for the help.

Thanks for the further response.

However I think there has been a bit of confusion - we have already pulled the data directly from the search console by exporting the CSV.

So the discrepancy still remains, unless all of the historical data that we pulled (for every month back to April) was pulled incorrectly.

We are likely to automate the extraction of data in future to try and avoid any human error (thanks for the link, which will be helpful as we work out how to do this), but we're fairly sure that there wasn't human error this time. This is due to the fact that the data was previously rounded (in both GA and the search console) to the nearest thousand. When this rounding stopped all the impressions numbers jumped significantly, and that's the issue we are trying to get to the bottom of.

We've been pulling the data from GA as follows:

Acquisition > Search Engine Optimisation > Landing Pages > Export CSV

We've not set up a dashboard so I guess it's "pulled by hand". I've checked and the number of impressions is the same (at least now) regardless of whether it's the Landing Pages or Queries data that is exported.

We followed exactly the same process when we first downloaded the data and so the data has definitely changed.

In the Search Console the data we've been using to cross-reference is in Search Traffic > Search Analytics.

It seems to me that we're unlikely to get a definitive answer on why it has changed and so we may need to simply start again with the past three months of data, and maybe set up a report so that we are 100% sure of the data export process. But any further advice would be gratefully received!

Hi Kate,

Many thanks for the response. Margot is away this week so I'm picking this up in her absence.

The August Impressions and Clicks data in Search Console is slightly different to the SEO data in GA (it appears to differ by up to ~8% in either direction), but appears generally consistent with the current data in GA.

The GA and Search Console data are both much higher (around 3 X) than what we have in the historical data we'd previously downloaded for August.

The August Impressions data we previously downloaded shows daily impressions, and each day is rounded to the nearest thousand (i.e. each daily number ends with 000). The new data in GA and Search Console appears to be no longer rounded at all. Surely this must be related.

Any further thoughts appreciated!

Thanks

Jamie

It's not that impressions have increased month-on-month, it's that data from August (which we initially downloaded at the beginning of September) is now showing much higher impressions etc data than when we initially downloaded it. This throws into doubt all the previous data (which we now cannot access because Analytics only goes back 3 months).