DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg,
Search advocate at Google.
And in this video, I'll talk about how
to use Search Console to monitor your site's
performance in Google Search.
By the end of this video, you should
be able to find data to answer important questions
about your site.
For example, how often people see your website in search
results and click to visit it.
What are the top search queries used
to discover your site's content?
Which countries, devices, and search features
work best for your site?
Those are just a few questions.
Let's dive deeper and find even more interesting insights
you can learn about your site's performance on Google Search.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The performance reports are divided into two sections--
Search and Discover.
All accounts have data on search.
In addition, web sites that have accumulated meaningful search
traffic in Discover will see a report for it.
In this video, I'll focus on search performance
as it is the most common use case.
Before we go into the details of the report,
I want to say a few words about metrics and dimensions, which
are fundamental concepts to understand the data.
Metrics are quantitative measurements.
They are the numbers you see for each of the columns of a table
or in the chart.
They usually describe how much and how often.
For example, in the performance report,
you'll find four metrics.
Impressions, the number of times your site appeared
in the search result. Clicks, the total number of times users
clicked from search result to your website.
Average click-through rate, or CTR,
the percentage of impressions that result in the click.
Average position, the average position
of your site in search results based
on its highest position whenever it appeared in a search result.
Dimensions are attributes of your data.
They usually describe who did something or where it happened.
For example, the dimension countries
indicates the country where searches for your site
originated, like United States or Japan.
The dimension pages indicates the page
that was viewed on a search or was clicked by a user.
Note that pages refer to the canonical page, which
means that if you have duplicate pages, only one of them
will be shown.
You can read more about it in our help center.
The performance report is built out of three main elements--
the filter bar, the chart, and the table.
Let's start with the chart as it's the most beautiful
visual element.
An image is worth a thousand words.
The first thing you need to know about the chart
is that you can choose the metrics, that you want to see,
including impressions, clicks, average CTR,
and average position.
In order to see the trends for different metrics,
you simply need to click the metrics themselves
to add or remove them from the chart.
Note that if you add or remove a metric,
it will update both the chart and the table.
The table element allows you to break down the metrics
according to the possible dimensions
that you can see just above the table--
queries, pages, countries, et cetera.
You can click each of those dimensions
to see a table with the metrics for that dimension.
For example, if you click Countries,
you will see a list of all countries
where your site was shown in search results
and how many clicks it generated.
Here are four ideas on what to look for when analyzing
your performance data.
Low click-through rate.
If the number of impressions is significantly higher
than clicks or, in other words, if the click-through rate,
or CTR, is very low for a query or a page,
you might need to create better titles and snippets in search
results in order to make your site more attractive to users.
Missing search queries.
If search queries that you expect to see don't appear,
your site might not have enough useful content
relevant to those queries.
Missing pages.
If important pages on your site are not in the pages list,
there might be an issue with them.
In that case, you should use Inspect URL to find out why.
We'll go over this tool in the next video.
Branded search queries.
Check how many queries show your site
when the user does or doesn't include a specific string,
such as your site's name.
These might show interesting areas
where people are searching for content directly
related to your brand.
I'll talk about how to use filters in a second.
Those are just a few examples of what information
you can learn from the default reports,
but sometimes checking the aggregate dimensions
and metrics might not be enough.
Filtering data can help you find interesting insights
about your performance on Search by helping you to explore
a more specific scenario.
To do so, use report filters.
You'll find them just above the chart.
Alternatively, you can simply click a relevant row
in the table, such as a specific country.
Doing that will filter the data in all the performance
report to include only the clicked country.
Let's try a filter.
Click New on the Filter bar above the chart.
You'll be asked to choose a dimension for which you'd
like to create the filter.
You can currently add filters for each of the dimensions
available on the tables and also search type and date.
Here's some filters that may help you understand your search
traffic.
Check what queries or pages are bringing traffic
through image search results by adding a search type filter
and choosing Image.
All the tabs in the report will update to provide you
only image search results.
You can then review the queries, the pages,
and the countries that are working best for image search.
Check the trends for desktop and mobile by adding a device
filter.
In this case, it might also make sense
to use a comparison filter, choosing
both mobile and desktop.
This will add both devices to the chart and tables
and allow an easy comparison between them
it might be interesting to look at the CTR
comparison between mobile and desktop
for queries, pages, and countries.
This information can help you understand your search audience
better.
Check where your site is trending upward and downward
by adding a country filter.
Visit the Countries tab of the report
and click the country with the highest amount of traffic.
This will filter the entire report
to include only this country.
Check the pages and queries most common
in these and other high-traffic countries
to inform your international targeting strategy
and localization priorities.
Note that when filtering by queries or pages,
the results shown in the chart might not
add up to the total shown in the table.
For example, if you create a query filter
not containing your brand name and another one
containing your brand name, they'll probably not
add up to the chart total.
The reason is that there are some queries that
are anonymized by Google for privacy reasons when filtering.
In addition, there is a limit to how many queries
the table can show.
See the documentation to learn more about this.
Another important detail about the data
is that when looking at different parts
of the performance report, part of the metrics
is aggregated by site, and part is aggregated by URL.
These can generate a few discrepancies.
I won't go over all the details, but I
suggest you visit our help center article
using the link below to better understand the data available.
Well, I hope you learned a few tricks
to understand and optimize your performance in Google Search.
In the next video, I'll go through the URL Inspection,
which is a valuable tool to help you understand how your page is
appearing in search results, or if not, why is it so.
Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Webmasters YouTube
channel, where we'll be publishing lots of Search
Console videos.
So stay tuned.
[MUSIC PLAYING]