The most commonly used data in Search Console is Google Search performance statistics, which is accessible via the Performance report and the Search Analytics API. This post goes over the data that is available and how Google processes it, including privacy filtering and other constraints relating to serving latency, storage, and processing resources. Have you ever wondered how these systems work? Let's take a closer look at them.
Check out the introduction to Performance reports if you're new to Search Console.
The fundamentals of search performance
The Performance report includes four measures that indicate the evolution of your search traffic over time. Here's a synopsis of the article that describes how each metric is calculated:
- Clicks: The number of times a person clicks on your property from Google Search results.
- Impressions: The number of times your property appeared in Google search results.
- CTR (Click-through rate): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.
- Position: The average position in search results for the URL, query, or website as a whole.
Each of the metrics can be examined for many dimensions. You can monitor the performance of each query, page, country, device, or search appearance that drives traffic to your website.
The product interface, the Search Analytics API, the Looker Studio connector, and spreadsheets are all options to retrieve Search performance statistics (requires manual download from the interface).
If you're using the product interface, you can get the dimensions via the filters or the dimensions tables that follow the chart, as seen in the picture below.
This data can be utilised to figure out how to make your website more prominent and, as a result, get more visitors from Google. Check out this sample optimization chart for an example of the type of analysis you can undertake.
Limits and data filtering
Data on the report interface and data exported are aggregated and filtered in various ways. The two main data constraints are listed below: privacy filtering and a daily data row limit.
Filtering for privacy
To safeguard the privacy of the user who makes the inquiry, some inquiries (known as anonymized queries) are not included in Search Console data.
Anonymized inquiries are ones that are not issued by more than a few dozen users over the course of two to three months. The actual queries will not be displayed in the Search performance data to safeguard privacy. This is why they are referred to as anonymized inquiries. While anonymized queries are automatically excluded from tables, they are included in graphic totals until you filter by query.
Let's look at an example to make it clearer - keep in mind that this is an example that just considers privacy filtering, but daily data row restrictions, detailed in the following section, may also play a role; read on to learn more. Assume the table below displays all of the traffic for queries to your website, including traffic from non-anonymized inquiries. Of course, a typical website will have more than four itemised non-anonymized inquiries, but for the purposes of this example, we'll assume that four are itemised.
As the graphic illustrates, there were 450 clicks when all itemised queries were added together. There have also been 550 total clicks to the site. This figure is larger because it includes all itemised clicks as well as clicks from anonymised queries that aren't reported.
In practise, you may discover this type of disparity in two ways when using Search Console reporting.
- Because there is no entry in the report table or API for anonymized queries (added here for illustrative purposes), adding up clicks for all the rows will not yield the same amount of clicks as the chart totals. For example, in this situation, the sum of the rows would be 450, while the chart totals would be 550.
- When a filter is performed, the anonymized searches are excluded, hence there will be a mismatch between the number of clicks in the chart totals and the sum of clicks containing and not including some string. In this scenario, using filters to include only "fiction" results in 175 hits, while excluding "fiction" results in 275 clicks, totaling 450 clicks, but the chart total is 550 clicks.
Data row limit per day
The quantity of data that may be displayed or exported by Search Console is limited due to limits linked to serving latency, storage, processing resources, and others. The bulk of properties in Search Console will be unaffected by these restrictions. This may effect a few very large websites, but even in such cases, we believe the remaining data will be substantial enough to provide a representative sample of data.
The maximum number of rows of data that can be exported via the Search Console user interface is 1,000. Currently, the maximum number of rows per day per site per search type that can be exported using the Search Analytics API (and via the Looker Studio connector) is 50,000, which may not be reached in all circumstances. The API will return 1,000 rows by default, but you may use rowLimit to boost it to 25,000 and startRow to get rows 25,001 to 50,000 using pagination. Check out this tutorial to find out how to obtain the accessible data.
Search Console will display and export all data for queries that do not include query or URL dimensions, such as countries, devices, and Search Appearances.
Source: Google Search Central
Comments
Post a Comment