Metrics and how they add up

Every report in the app is built from four numbers.

• Clicks: how many times people clicked through to your site from search results.
• Impressions: how many times your site appeared in search results, whether or not anyone clicked.
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage. If you had 30 clicks from 1,000 impressions, your CTR is 3.0%. Changes in CTR are shown in percentage points (pp). Going from 2.9% to 3.4% is up 0.5 pp, not up 0.5%.
• Average position: where your page ranked on average, where 1 is the top of the results. Lower is better. A move from 17.6 to 17.0 is an improvement, even though the number went down. Position is a weighted average: days or queries with more impressions count for more. That is why the position of a group of queries is not the plain average of their positions.

Week and month totals

• Clicks and impressions are added up.
• CTR is worked out again from the new totals (total clicks divided by total impressions). It is not an average of daily CTRs.
• Position is a weighted average, weighted by impressions.
• A week starts on Monday. A month starts on the 1st. The date shown for a week or month is its first day.

Smoothing: the 7-day line on the chart shows the average of the last 7 days (fewer at the very start). It evens out weekends.

Recent days are marked preliminary, because search engines are still adding data. They are usually lower than their final values. A week or month that includes a preliminary day is also marked preliminary.

Reading changes

• For clicks and impressions, changes are percentages, with an arrow showing the direction of the number.
• For CTR, changes are in percentage points.
• For position, changes are in positions. A smaller number is a better ranking, so the arrow points down but the colour is green. The arrow shows what the number did; the colour shows whether that is good.
• “New” means there was nothing to compare with.