Google Search Console and Naver DataLab: How to See Search Data for Free

For: anyone who's used GA4 but is new to search data tools  ·  Format: explainer guide  ·  2026-07-11

What You Can't See No Matter How Often You Check GA4

Plenty of people leave GA4 open and check the Realtime, Acquisition, and Conversion reports every day. But the thing you actually want to know, "what did this visitor type into the search box that brought them to our site," isn't anywhere on GA4's screen. That's because GA4 is a tool that only records a user's behavior after they've visited the site.

There's an even more frustrating question. How many times did my page show up in search results, how many of those people clicked, and why didn't the rest click, GA4 fundamentally can't answer this. The structure is such that the GA4 log only starts once a click happens, so anything before the click is entirely outside its observable range.

Looking at the whole act of searching, GA4 only sees the back half. The front half, typing into the search box, scanning the results screen, and deciding whether to click, only shows up if you open a completely different tool.

GA4 only records what happens after a click. What happens inside the search box is another tool's job.

Before and After the Search: A Map Drawn With Four Tools

Each tool is responsible for a different segment. Try to see everything with just one, and the other three stay a permanent blind spot.

Why is this so confusing? Everyone lumps it all together under one phrase, "search data," but in reality it points to three segments with completely different characters.

The first segment is inside the search results screen itself. How many times your page showed up and how many times it got clicked is handled by Search Console for Google, and Search Advisor for Naver. The second segment is after the visit, GA4 tracks what someone who clicked through actually looked at and how long they stayed.

The third segment isn't about your site at all. How much a given keyword gets searched across the entire market is answered by DataLab and Google Trends. It's purely statistics about the search box itself, unrelated to your site's own logs. Draw these three segments as one map, and you get the picture below.

Google Search Console: Impressions, Clicks, CTR, and Rank, for Free

Search Console's Performance report gives you 4 metrics. Impressions is how many times your page showed up in search results, Clicks is how many of those were actually clicked, CTR is clicks divided by impressions, and Average position is the average rank your page landed at. Data can be broken down by query, page, country, device, and search type (web/image/video/news), and the time frame can be adjusted too, the default is the last 3 months.

A separate Coverage report lets you check whether a page was actually indexed, and if not, reasons like duplication, a crawl failure, or a robots.txt block.

Put Search Console and GA4 side by side, and their roles split completely apart. Search Console logs everything before the click (impressions, rank, CTR, index status), while GA4 tracks after the visit. On top of that, Search Console only aggregates by canonical URL, while GA4 catches even variant URLs with tracking parameters like UTM attached. GA4 automatically filters out bot traffic but Search Console doesn't, and Search Console's time zone is locked to Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8) and can't be changed. So it's recommended to link the two together via Search Console's integration feature and view them together.

There are officially 7 ways to verify ownership (DNS record, HTML file upload, HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Sites, Blogger). Of these, GA or GTM integration is usually the least hands-on. If your site already has a GA4 tag or GTM container installed and you just have edit permission on that account, you get verified while already logged in, no need to upload a new file or touch DNS.

Naver Search Advisor: Registering Your Site With Naver Search

Search Advisor is, put simply, Naver's version of Search Console. The flow is register → verify ownership (meta tag or HTML file) → submit sitemap/RSS → check crawl status → check search exposure. RSS is for quickly notifying content changes, while a sitemap helps pages with shallow internal linking get crawled too, so the two serve different roles.

Registering alone doesn't get you exposed right away. The commonly reported timeframe across several practical guides is that actual crawling and exposure typically takes 1-4 weeks (roughly 14-16 days) after registration. In the meantime, you just check the number of indexed URLs and any crawl-restricted URLs on the crawl status screen and wait.

Registering is like filing your address at the post office. Skip the filing, and even if you exist, the crawler can't find you.

Naver DataLab: A Thermometer for Measuring Market Interest

What DataLab measures is temperature, not headcount. How many people is a different tool's answer to give.

Search Term Trends lets you compare up to 5 keywords at once, and break it down by period, gender, age, and device (PC/mobile). Here's the one point most commonly misunderstood: the numbers on this screen are not actual search counts. Within the period you set, the point with the highest search volume is set to 100, and everything else is converted and shown as a relative ratio against that.

Thinking of a thermometer makes this easier to grasp. A thermometer doesn't tell you "how many people showed up," only "how hot is it right now." 100 degrees marks the hottest point, and every other reading is a relative temperature against that peak. The actual headcount (search count) never appears anywhere on the thermometer.

Some sources say you need Naver Cloud Platform's paid Data Box service to see the absolute value, but this was only confirmed by a single source during research, so cross-verification is insufficient. Leaving it here only as a reference.

DataLab also has Shopping Insight for small merchants. It's made up of three sub-features: category statistics that track click trends for a chosen shopping category, a list of daily popular search terms by category, and detailed age/gender/device statistics for search terms that generated clicks within a specific category.

Google Trends: Same Principle, Different Market

Google Trends also normalizes data on a 0-100 scale. 100 is the peak popularity point within the chosen region and period, 50 is half that, and 0 means there wasn't enough data. The design principle, that it shows relative interest rather than absolute search volume, is entirely the same as DataLab's.

There's one thing to watch out for when comparing regions. Even if two regions' relative values look the same, their actual total search volumes can differ, because normalization is a relative value within a region. Long-term trend comparisons are calculated on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), so you can view them without regional time zone or daylight saving differences getting in the way.

DataLab and Google Trends share the same principle, just different markets. DataLab is based on Naver search data, Google Trends on Google search data. The commonly accepted rule of thumb is that DataLab has more representativeness for research targeting Korean consumers, while Google Trends is more representative for global or English-speaking trends (this wasn't confirmed from a specific primary comparison document, it's a conclusion synthesized from multiple secondary sources).

The Tool That Fills In the Relative Value's Blank: Naver Search Ads Keyword Tool

Logging into Naver Search Ads gives you access to the Keyword Tool. The exact menu location is described slightly differently across sources, so the surest way is to log in and find it directly on the screen.

Run a lookup, and it gives you Monthly Search Volume (PC+mobile combined) as an absolute figure. It's stated as "the actual figure that occurred over the past month," not an average. Where DataLab only gave you a relative value, this fills in the blank with a real number. Average monthly clicks and competitive intensity (low/medium/high) come out together in a table too.

Three Ways to Use These Tools Together

Now that you know each tool individually, it's time to combine them. There are broadly three combinations commonly used in practice.

Content topic discovery. Use DataLab's Search Term Trends first to screen the relative popularity trend among candidate keywords (free, up to 5 at once). Once you've narrowed it down to strong candidates, log into the Search Ads Keyword Tool to verify scale via absolute monthly search volume. After publishing content, track that keyword's impressions, clicks, and rank in Search Console to confirm actual acquisition performance.

Watching brand awareness trends. Enter your brand name itself into DataLab or Google Trends and look at the trend before and after a campaign. Watching the change in impressions and average position for brand-name queries in Search Console alongside this lets you cross-verify "are more people looking us up" against "how highly are we actually ranking in search results." This approach of using brand search volume as a proxy metric for awareness is in the same vein as the "measuring side" method covered in Dark Funnel Tracking, essentially inferring an awareness shift that never shows up in web logs, through search volume instead.

Understanding seasonality. Set a long lookback of 1-5 years in DataLab's Search Term Trends to check a specific keyword's recurring monthly/seasonal pattern. For shopping-related items, also look at the seasonality of click trends via Shopping Insight's category statistics. Use this as the basis for prepping content and campaigns a few weeks ahead of the season's arrival.

Theory's Done, Here's What to Check Today

Register once, check weekly, that's the rhythm. Today, just finishing registration is enough.

All four tools can be turned on for free. Follow the order, and you can register all of them and see the first screen within 30 minutes.

If you only take one thing away, let it be this.

DataLab is temperature, the Keyword Tool is headcount, Search Console is what happens next. Read all three together and the picture completes.

Sources

• Search Console's 4 core metrics, default view, index report: Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup, Google Search Console Help
• Search Console's 7 ownership verification methods: Verify your site ownership, Google Search Console Help (confirmed via search snippet, direct page fetch failed)
• Search Console vs. GA4 differences (secondary cross-check): Google Search Console vs. Google Analytics 4, Oneupweb
• Search Console's 16-month data limit (secondary cross-check): Multiple SEO tool blogs including DadSEO, SEO Stack Blog, seotesting.com
• Naver Search Advisor flow and timeframe (secondary cross-check): Complete Guide to Setting Up Naver Search Advisor, weekerp, Registering a Website with Naver Search Advisor, TBWA, Naver Search Advisor RSS/Sitemap Submission
• Naver DataLab Search Term Trends, relative values (secondary cross-check): Keyword Statistics Analysis via Naver DataLab, TBWA, Naver DataLab, The Egg
• Naver Shopping Insight (secondary cross-check): How to Source Products with Naver Shopping Insight, Windly
• Google Trends 0-100 normalization: FAQ about Google Trends data
• Naver Search Ads Keyword Tool absolute search volume (secondary cross-check): How to Use the Naver Keyword Tool Effectively, The Egg

The three official Naver pages, Search Advisor, DataLab, and Search Ads, were inaccessible for direct viewing, and were substituted with cross-checks across multiple secondary practical sources as noted above. The explanation of Data Box as a paid absolute-value source has only one source, so it's left in for reference only, and parts that couldn't be pinned to an official source, like the Keyword Tool's exact menu path or the 16-month limit's official basis, are stated as such in the body.

This post is Part 4 of the 'Intro to Digital Marketing Analytics' series. Previous parts are Getting Started with GA4 and Cookies, Sessions, and Events Basics, and the advanced part putting search data to practical use continues in Dark Funnel Tracking.