Search Console has several different performance reports that show how often users saw information or links to your site on Search, News, or Discover; whether they clicked through to your site; and much more. Use these reports to see if your site is performing appropriately, and to see information that can help you maximize your performance on Google.
What do these reports measure?
The reports measure the following metrics:
- Impressions: A user saw a link to your page or site in a Google service (Search, News, or Discover). Whether or not the link must be scrolled into view, and other details, depend on the report and the resource type. Learn more about impressions.
- Clicks: A user clicked a link to your page or site in a Google service (Search, News, or Discover). Some link types have specific behavior that is calculated differently. Learn more about clicks.
- Click-through rate: Clicks divided by impressions. A high click-through rate means that your content seems to match what users are searching for.
- Some reports also show additional data, such as user query or position in results, depending on the report type.
You can filter results by various dimensions such as page URL (partial or full match), country, and date. Results are pre-grouped by dimensions.
Data is shown only for links that send the user to the current Search Console property. Data for links that point to another property can't be shown for privacy reasons. Thus, if an image is hosted on https://images.example.com, data for that image won't be shown in the property https://news.example.com. Data for https://example.com/images can be shown on property https://example.com, because it's a child property.
Performance reports in Search Console - Google Search Console Training
The following sections show how to get started with the different Performance reports.
This report shows how your site performs in Google Search. Any item on Google Search results that points to your site is included when calculating clicks and impressions. This includes "standard blue links" as well as images and videos which, when clicked, will navigate users to your page (though it might take two clicks to do so, as with images).
Get Started
You can filter and group by type (image, video, or news searches), URL (exact or partial match) and more in the search performance report.
1. Explore a little
- Click the Queries, Pages, and Countries tabs to see how you perform for different categories.
- In Queries, see what search queries showed your site. Are they what you expected? What is the click through rate for the queries that you think you should score well for? If CTR is low on queries that are important, do a similar Google search to see what comes up and might be drawing more traffic than your site.
- In Pages, see which are your best performing pages.
- Click a query to automatically filter all results to that specific query. You can click any row to filter by that dimension. Remove filters by clicking the X next to the filter.
2. See how you performed in image search
Default search types is Web (which is the default search result type in Google Search). Change to see your performance on Google image search:
- Click Search type at the top of the page
- Choose Image and Apply to see how you perform on image search.
- Click the Pages tab, and note that this doesn't show the URL of the images searched for, but the pages where the users land when they click an image in Google image search results.
3. Compare how well you did this week vs the previous week
- Click the Date filter at the top of the page
- Click Compare
- Choose the option to compare the last week to the previous week.
4. Compare your top query performance in two countries
- Click the top row in the Queries tab to filter the report to that query. Note that you can click the X next to the filter at the top of the report to show all queries again.
- Click + New at the top of the page, to add filters and comparisons to the report
- Click Country then Compare
- Choose two countries from the list. The lists will include only countries for which you have data.
- Click Apply to see your data.
- When you're done, click the X next to the comparison filter at the top of the report to remove the comparison.
5. Find the full list of search appearance types supported by this report
Tip: your report won't show them all, because the report shows only search appearance types with data on your site, and no site has all types.
- Click the help button
at the top of the page. - Scroll down to the Search Appearance section and expand it to see the full list of supported search appearance types.
at the top of the page.6. See how well you're performing for specific queries
- Click the Queries tab.
- Click the Total clicks, Total impressions, and Average CTR tabs on the chart
- See how often your site's pages appear for queries that you think are relevant. If they don't appear as often as you think they should, work on your site's SEO for the topics that you think it should rank for.
- See queries where users aren't clicking through, but they should. Look for high impression, low CTR pages. If there are any queries that you think you should be doing better for, look at the titles and snippets generated for those pages and see whether you think they accurately answer the question, or how they can be improved by updating your page content. Don't assume that you need to capture 100% of a query; there are a lot of variables that determine which page a user clicks.
- Look at the country and device used, to see if your impressions or CTR are affected by the given locale or device. Are your pages performing worse on mobile? Maybe you need to improve your mobile usability.
7. Check for expected and unexpected keywords
If keywords that you expect to see don't appear, your site might not have enough useful content relevant to those keywords.
If unexpected words (like "Viagra" or "casino") appear, it's likely that your site has been hacked.
8. Find branded vs not-branded query totals
You might want to see how many queries show your site when the user does or doesn't include a specific string, such as a brand name. Important: Anonymized queries are dropped when filtering by query, so you can only approximate this value, but very roughly, the branded query percentage is:
|
(Queries containing "some value") (Queries not containing "some value") + (Queries containing "some value") |
Advanced usage...
There are a lot more details to learn as you dig into the data, including understanding which URLs are credited with data (the canonical), grouping by site or URL, truncated data, and more.
This report shows how often you appear on Google Discover, and the clicks and click-through rate for your appearances.
Remember that your site must get a minimum number of impressions in the last 3 months to be eligible for this report. Pages must also have a minimum number of impressions in Discover to appear in the report. An impression is counted only when a page link is scrolled into view. Impressions and clicks are always assigned to the URL of the final location where the user arrives when clicking the Discover link.
Get Started
Filter and group your results by page, country, date, and more.
Compare how well you did this week vs the previous week
- Click the Date filter at the top of the page
- Click Compare
- Choose the option to compare the last week to the previous week.
Compare your site performs for the top 2 countries in Discover
- Click the Countries tab to see your top 2 countries
- Click + New at the top of the page, to add filters and comparisons to the report.
- Click Country, then Compare
- Enter the names of the two countries that you found in step 1.
Advanced usage...
There are a lot more details to learn as you dig into the data.
This report shows shows your site's performance data on news.google.com, and on the Google News app for Android and iOS. This report appears only if you have a sufficient number of impressions on these platforms. Learn more about how to manage your appearance in Google News.
Get Started
Filter and group your results by page, country, date, and more.
Compare how well you did this week vs the previous week
- Click the Date filter at the top of the page
- Click Compare
- Choose the option to compare the last week to the previous week.
Compare your site performs for the top 2 countries in Discover
- Click the Countries tab to see your top 2 countries
- Click + New at the top of the page, to add filters and comparisons to the report.
- Click Country, then Compare
- Enter the names of the two countries that you found in step 1.
Advanced usage...
There are a lot more details to learn as you dig into the data.