Google’s Webmaster Tools is taking another step toward becoming a “lite” version of Google Analytics with the announcement today of additional data about search queries that drive traffic to your site and which pages benefit the most from them.
There’s a new “Top pages” tab in the Search Queries section of Webmaster Tools, and this tab is where you’ll find data for the pages that perform the best in Google’s search results. You’ll get impressions, click counts, average position, and more for individual pages on your site. Clicking on any page URL will show a list of what search terms are sending traffic to it, as shown here:
At this point, you can then click on any of the search terms to see how it performs across your site — which pages get traffic from this term. I haven’t done any comparisons between this data and what Google Analytics; it seems that there’s usually some discrepancy between the two, but this still provides a nice snapshot from the Webmaster Tools interface.
The filtering options on the above data have also been updated. And one other new thing: Webmaster Tools is now also showing when links to your site go through a redirect. Webmaster Tools refers to this as an “intermediate link,” and it’ll be visible in the “Links to your site” section.