This week, Google announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog that they are allowing you to link your Google Analytics account to your Google Webmaster Tools account.
The linkage is not related to Analytics verification option within Webmaster Tools, but more related to linking your Analytics reports in the Webmaster Tools reports.
Currently, all this linkage does is add a link from the "Links to your site" page in Webmaster Tools to the Google Analytics Referring Pages report within Google Analytics. It does not show the Analytics data within Webmaster Tools, just gives you a link directly to that report. Here is a picture:
Vanessa Fox has high hopes that this is an early sign of future integration of the two platforms. She said she already has tools internally that bridge the two data points into a single report. Vanessa said:
Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (or any analytics) data are great together. Ive built software that we use at my company to integrate this data for better insights. This integration could be built directly into Webmaster Tools. That the user interface now features a way to link the two together could mean that the way is paved for this type of integration.
But are Vanessa's hopes too high reaching? A link in Webmaster Tools to Analytics is a lot simpler than incorporating the data into Webmaster Tools. Further more, if Google is already thinking that this would be useful, hence the link they added, wouldn't they just incorporate the data in webmaster tools if it was more useful? To me, this is a sign that this is all we are going to get for a while. Of course, we have APIs, so you, like Vanessa, can make your own report mashups.
For more on adding the link between the two, see the Google blog.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
Update: I am happy to be wrong here, at least, I am now expecting deeper integration between the two products in the future.
