Google Analytics and Search Console for your pharmacy

Two free tools from Google, both installable in an afternoon, and most people look at the wrong one. They do not do remotely the same thing: one tells you what happens inside your site and the other how people get to it.

	Google Analytics 4	Search Console
Looks at…	What happens inside	What happens on Google
Answers	How many people come, to which pages, what they click, where they leave	What they search for, where you rank, how many see you and how many come in
Needs	A snippet of code on your site	Verifying the site is yours
Takes	Minutes	Days. Set it up today even if you will not look at it
Used for	Deciding what to change on the site	Deciding what to write about

If you are only going to install one, install Search Console. Analytics tells you what people who already arrived are doing; Search Console tells you why the rest never arrive, which is almost always the bigger problem and the cheaper one to fix.

The one thing you have to understand about Search Console

Search Console gives you four numbers per search: impressions (how many people saw your link), clicks, CTR (the share who came in out of those who saw it) and average position.

And those four answer the only question that matters: does this page need a better title or does it need more content? They are not the same thing and the remedy for one does nothing for the other.

Average position	What is happening	What a title fixes
≤ 6	Google already shows you. If the CTR is low, your sentence is not convincing	Everything. It is the only thing failing
> 7	Hardly anyone scrolls down that far	Nothing. You have to climb first, and that is content

Written down it looks obvious and in practice it is not: it is terribly easy to spend an afternoon polishing the headline of a page sitting at position 11, feel like you worked, and move not one click.

Measured on this site (three months): a million impressions, 26,000 clicks, 2.5 % CTR — with the top page at position 4.7. The rankings were already good. What was failing was the sentence the site introduces itself with, and that is one line of HTML per page.

Installing Analytics without ending up at zero

This is the part most often got wrong, and the symptom is brutal: an empty dashboard with the site working fine. It happened here, and the two causes are the same ones as on almost every site.

The snippet goes in the <head> of EVERY page

Not just the home page. If your site is loose files, it has to go in all of them — and count them, because "all of them" is always more than you remember.
The cookie banner: the order decides everything

With Consent Mode, if you start with analytics denied, the visit is sent at that moment as a cookieless ping — which does not count in the reports. When somebody later accepts, nothing else is sent.

Result: an empty dashboard with thousands of visits. Here it was chased for weeks in the wrong place. The decision that fixes it is a product one, not a technical one: grant analytics by default (measuring is legitimate interest and carries no advertising behind it) and leave advertising denied, with a reject button that genuinely works and is remembered.
If you have security headers, check the CSP

Analytics does not send the data to the domain you would expect: for European traffic it uses a regional endpoint. If your security policy only allows the "normal" domain, the beacons are blocked and the dashboard says there is no data.

You can see it in the browser console: Refused to connect errors. If you have no CSP, this does not apply to you.
Tag the three or four buttons you care about

Page views count themselves; what people click does not. And without that you know how many come in and how many buy, but nothing in between — which is exactly where something can be fixed.

Pick few: the tool button, the book-an-appointment button, the form submit. Three well-placed ones show you the whole funnel.

⚠️ The metric call must not be able to break what it measures. If it sits inside the save button and throws, it takes the save with it. Wrap it so it can never throw.

What to look at, and how often

Every	Where	What
Month	Search Console	Queries at position ≤ 6 with low CTR → rewrite that title
Month	Search Console	Queries with lots of impressions at position 8-20 → a page is missing there
Quarter	Analytics	Which pages take the traffic and which nobody opens
Quarter	Analytics	The events: do they press the button? do they press it and not finish?
Never	Neither	Checking it daily. Daily noise cannot tell a trend from a Tuesday

That row about impressions at position 8-20 is the gold mine. They are searches Google already associates with you and where you do not make the first screen: each one is a missing page or an article that stops short. It is the most reliable to-do list you will ever have, and it writes itself every month.

Three things Analytics will NOT tell you

Why they leave. It tells you how many and from where, not the reason. For that, open the page on a phone and use it yourself.
How much you sell through the site, unless you tag it by hand.
The exact truth. Blockers eat a share of the traffic — more among younger audiences — so the absolute number is a floor. Use it to compare against yourself, not to boast.

Three tools that measure different things and never agree

The first thing that happens once everything is installed is that the numbers do not match, and the natural reaction is to assume something is misconfigured. It is not: they measure different things, and knowing exactly what each one measures saves weeks of chasing differences that are not errors.

	What it actually counts	What it cannot see
Search Console	What happens in Google: how often you are shown and how often you are clicked	Nothing that happens inside your site. Not direct traffic, not social
GA4	What happens inside: where people come from and what they do	Anybody blocking the script. And anybody refusing cookies, depending on setup
Your host's analytics	Real requests, counted at the server	Where they came from and what they did. It is a counter, not analysis

The practical consequence: the differences are NOT a bug to fix. The host will always report more than GA4, and Search Console has no reason to resemble either. What you do is pick one source per question — "how many people come" always from the same place — and stop comparing. Comparing figures from two tools that count different things is how a whole afternoon disappears without learning anything.

And there is one difference that does matter: if the host counts hundreds of visits and GA4 shows zero, that is not a difference — GA4 is not measuring. It is a binary failure and it has three possible causes, all three in the table at the end of this lesson.

Installing it properly: four steps and the three places it fails

The property and the data stream

You create the property, create a web data stream, and out comes an identifier. That is the only value you need.

And there is already a trap nobody warns you about: Google may show you two similar identifiers — the tag one and the stream one — and both work because they point at the same place. Use the one on the installation-instructions screen and do not overthink it; if two places on your site carry two different IDs, that is a problem.
The code goes in the <head>, on EVERY page

A page without the snippet does not exist for analytics. And since pages get added all the time, this gets forgotten: the check is to search for the identifier across every file and count. If the number does not match your page count, one is missing.
Consent: the trap that leaves everything at zero

Consent mode decides whether a visit counts. And there is a very specific scenario where everything arrives denied: if the pageview is recorded at the instant consent is still "denied" and acceptance comes afterwards, that hit already went out as a ping that does not count — and no further one is sent.

It looks like this: the panel says the tag is installed, there are no console errors, and the reports are empty. It is the most demoralising of the three because everything looks fine.
The security headers

If your site declares where it may load and connect from — and it should — analytics has to be allowed. And allowing the obvious domain is not enough: measurement data is sent to regional subdomains different from the one serving the script. Allowing only the script's domain is the number one cause of "it loads fine and nothing arrives".

The check takes thirty seconds: open your site with the browser console open and look for red errors mentioning analytics. If they are there, this is it.

The three failures above share the worst possible property: none of them shows a visible error. No red screen, no warning. All you see is an empty report, which is exactly what you would see if nobody visited your site. That is why the real first check is not opening the dashboard: it is visiting your own site from your phone and seeing whether you appear in real time. If you do not appear, nobody does.

What deserves to be an event, and what is noise

GA4 counts visits by itself. What it does not count — and what is the only thing that answers whether your site works — are actions. But measuring everything is the same as measuring nothing: with thirty events you look at none.

Deserves an event	Does not
They used the calculator and got a result	They scrolled
They pressed "book" or "call"	They hovered over the menu
They submitted the form	They opened the form
They reached the end of a multi-step flow	Each intermediate step, if you will never act on it

The test is a single question: what would you do differently if this number went up or down? If the answer is "nothing", it is not an event: it is noise with a name. Five events you look at are worth infinitely more than thirty nobody reads — and the cost of the thirty is not storage, it is that they bury the five.

An event, properly placed

// ⚠️ ALWAYS wrap it in try/catch. This line lives inside the button
// handler: if the metric throws, it takes down exactly the action
// you were trying to measure.
function event(name, data) {
  try {
    if (typeof gtag === 'function') gtag('event', name, data || {});
  } catch (e) { /* measuring must never break the page */ }
}

// And when using it: stable names, never free text from the user.
event('calculator_result', { tool: 'payroll', agreement: 'national' });

Two rules are visible in that snippet and both cost dearly when missing. First: the try/catch, because a metric that throws inside a button handler breaks the button. Second: never send what the user typed. A search field sent as a parameter ends up putting exactly what people type into analytics — which is a third-party service. Send the category, not the content.

Search Console: the four numbers and the one that lies

Search Console gives four figures per query and per page, and they only make sense together:

Figure	What it is	What it means when it moves alone
Impressions	Times you appeared	Rising on their own: Google is showing you more. Good
Clicks	Times you were clicked	The only number that is actually traffic
CTR	Clicks ÷ impressions	Falling while impressions rise means you are appearing where nobody clicks you
Average position	The mean rank	This is the one that lies. See below

An average position is an average, and an average can correspond to no reality at all. If a page ranks 3rd for a search almost nobody makes and 14th for the one everybody makes, the average says "8.5" — and it is never at 8.5. What you look at is the position per query, weighted by its impressions: the one lots of people see is the one that rules.

And out of that comes the rule that decides what is worth working on:

Position 6 or better: Google already shows you. If nobody clicks, the problem is the title and description — and that is fixed in one line of HTML.
Position 7 or worse: hardly anybody sees you. Rewriting the title fixes nothing, because the problem is not the phrase: it is that you do not get there. That needs content.

Two different problems with two opposite fixes, and confusing them is the most common way to work hard without moving a number.

The funnel for a pharmacy, and what to measure at each step

With both tools in place, this is what you can reconstruct end to end. And the point is not the numbers: it is where people fall out, because that tells you what to fix.

Step	Where it comes from	If they drop here, the problem is…
They search	Impressions (GSC)	You do not exist for those searches
They click	Clicks and CTR (GSC)	The title, if you are in the top 6
They stay	Sessions and time (GA4)	The page does not answer what the title promised
They do something	Your event (GA4)	The action is invisible, or what they gain is unclear
They come back	Returning users (GA4)	It helped once and there is no reason to repeat

The step nearly everybody skips is the fourth. It is the only one that tells "nobody presses the button" apart from "everybody presses it and hits something that drives them away". Both look identical from above — few final results — and have opposite fixes: the first is fixed by moving the button, the second by removing what is behind it. Without the intermediate event you are choosing blind between two different jobs.

What to look at, and how often

Every	What	Why that rhythm
Week	GSC clicks and your two or three events	That is what moves in a week. The rest does not
Month	Queries in position 5-10 with volume	It is next month's to-do list, and it writes itself
Quarter	Which pages rose and which disappeared	SEO moves in quarters. Checking weekly only produces anxiety

And a warning that saves grief: looking at the data every day does not make it go up, and it does make you take decisions on noise. A slow Tuesday means nothing. The useful rule is never act on less than three weeks of data unless something has dropped to zero — that one is a technical failure and gets looked at today.

Before you call this learned

I know which question each of the two answers.
I have Search Console verified, even if I am not looking at it yet.
I check that Analytics actually receives data, not that the snippet is present.
Faced with a weak page, I look at POSITION before deciding what to fix.
I have three buttons tagged, and their tracking cannot break what it measures.

← Previous: coding with AI Next: a chatbot for your pharmacy →

Google Analytics and Search Console

The one thing you have to understand about Search Console

Installing Analytics without ending up at zero

The snippet goes in the `<head>` of EVERY page

The cookie banner: the order decides everything

If you have security headers, check the CSP

Tag the three or four buttons you care about

What to look at, and how often

Three things Analytics will NOT tell you

Three tools that measure different things and never agree

Installing it properly: four steps and the three places it fails

The property and the data stream

The code goes in the `<head>`, on EVERY page

Consent: the trap that leaves everything at zero

The security headers

What deserves to be an event, and what is noise

Search Console: the four numbers and the one that lies

The funnel for a pharmacy, and what to measure at each step

What to look at, and how often

Before you call this learned

Google Analytics and Search Console

The one thing you have to understand about Search Console

Installing Analytics without ending up at zero

The snippet goes in the <head> of EVERY page

The cookie banner: the order decides everything

If you have security headers, check the CSP

Tag the three or four buttons you care about

What to look at, and how often

Three things Analytics will NOT tell you

Three tools that measure different things and never agree

Installing it properly: four steps and the three places it fails

The property and the data stream

The code goes in the <head>, on EVERY page

Consent: the trap that leaves everything at zero

The security headers

What deserves to be an event, and what is noise

Search Console: the four numbers and the one that lies

The funnel for a pharmacy, and what to measure at each step

What to look at, and how often

Before you call this learned

The snippet goes in the `<head>` of EVERY page

The code goes in the `<head>`, on EVERY page