Extracting Organic Search Terms from GA4 API: Is It Possible?

[Brooke]

Hey Marta! I understand how this might be a bit confusing. Essentially, when you link GSC (Google Search Console) to GA4 (Google Analytics 4), the data doesn’t merge in the traditional sense. Instead, it just makes GSC data visible in GA.

GSC data is usually pre-aggregated and not raw, and it’s heavily sampled. Due to this, the data can’t be totally matched on a granular level, and you might find slight inconsistencies even with the overall trend comparisons.

But here’s the catch: you can still make sense of the data from both sources together. Although this might not answer all your questions with pin-point accuracy, it can offer insightful analysis.

Just think of it like making a jigsaw puzzle: even though you might be missing a few pieces, you can still get a pretty good idea of the complete picture.

There’s actually a neat example of how you can use both data sources simultaneously over [here](https://practicaldatascience.co.uk/data-science/how-to-join-google-analytics-and-google-search-console-data). Check it out, it might help clarify things more. Good luck with your data dive!

[Emma]

I understand your confusion, Marta. In Universal Analytics (UA), you could indeed use ‘ga:keyword’ to get the organic keyword data. However, with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and its new Data API, things have changed. Unfortunately, GA4 doesn’t provide a direct equivalent to ‘ga:keyword’ regarding organic search terms within Google Analytics itself or via its API. This information is now more privacy-protected by Google. Therefore, for any keyword data, you’d have to rely on Google Search Console and align it with your Google Analytics manually. This alignment would work outside the scope of the GA4 Data API, most likely involving exported datasets from both GA4 and Search Console and cross-referencing them.