What are impressions, position, and clicks?

This page helps explain impressions, position values, and click data as used in Search Console, and especially in the Performance reports.

Introduction

Search Console provides data showing how often users saw or interacted with links to or content from your site, in Google Search, News, and Discover. This data is available in the various performance reports.

The performance reports show the following metrics:

• Impressions: How often someone saw a link to your site on Google. Depending on the result type, the link might need to be scrolled or expanded into view. See more details below.
• Clicks: How often someone clicked a link from Google to your site. See more details below.
• (average) Position: A relative ranking of the position of your link on Google, where 1 is the topmost position, 2 is the next position, and so on. Shown only for Google Search results. See more details below.
• Click-through rate: The calculation of (clicks ÷ impressions).

This document describes these metrics in more detail, and some implementation specifics for many types of items that you might see in Google Search results.

Anatomy of a search result

Content can be displayed in many different formats in Google Search, including links, images, or snippets of information. For example, here is a very basic search result that includes only one link (the classic "plain blue link"):

An element can also be a compound element that contains many links, and even interactive elements. For example, a horizontally scrolling list of AMP pages, or a knowledge panel entry with many links. 

All data is assigned to links in the element (or rather, to the URL that each link points to). Click, impression, and position data are attributed to the canonical URL of the link. A canonical URL is basically the URL that Google chooses as the URL that best represents a page, when multiple URLs point to what is essentially the same page (for example, if a site has separate URLs for the mobile and desktop versions of a page). See more details.

Sometimes a link is obviously a link, such as in the plain blue link above. Sometimes a link is less obvious: for example, an image in image search is actually a link to the image within the host page. Each link in an element can potentially be assigned its own data (impressions, clicks, and so on). More details given later.

What is an impression?

An impression means that a user has seen (or potentially seen) a link to your site in Search, Discover, or News.

In general, an impression is counted whenever an item appears in the current page of results, whether or not the item is scrolled into view, as long as the user need not click to see more results (such being required to click "see more" to see the link).

However, inside independently scrolling or expanding search result widgets, such a results carousel or an expanding section like an FAQ result, the item must typically be scrolled into view within the carousel, or expanded by a click, to register an impression.

For scrolled results without paging (infinite scrolling), such as image search in mobile or a card in Discover, the item must typically be scrolled into view to count an impression.

The general rule is that if you must click to see more results, an impression is counted when a link is in the current set of results, whether or not it's scrolled into view, but please read the details below for a specific item type to be sure.

Scrolling away and back, or paging away and back, during a single query or session does not count as multiple impressions.

Why are impressions important?

Impressions are important because someone needs to see a link to your property in order to click to visit it. However, you should aim not simply for more impressions, but meaningful impressions. This means being seen by people who will find your information useful and worth reading. Being seen, or clicked, by people who don't find your content useful and will quickly leave is not a healthy way to build website traffic and loyalty. Whoever said "there's no such thing as bad publicity" didn't have their user's best interests in mind.

Aggregating impressions by property or by page

If a single search element contains several links, impressions are counted either by URL or by property, depending on various filtering options in the Performance report.

Here's an example of grouping by property versus grouping by URL, based on a user seeing the following knowledge panel with several image and text links:

• If you look at the Performance report with data grouped by property, only one impression is counted for the entire card:

  • www.example.com - 1 impression

• However, if you look at the report with data grouped by page, you would see five pages with one impression each:
  • www.example.com (text link) - 1 impression
  • www.example.com/rain (one text link, one image link) - 1 impression
  • www.example.com/rainbow (one text link, one image link) - 1 impression
  • www.example.com/shamrock (one image link) - 1 impression
  • www.example.com/lightning (one image link) - 1 impression

Although some of these URLs have multiple links in the knowledge panel, all impressions for the same page are combined into a single impression when grouping data by page.

See element-specific details for additional information about what counts as an impression.

What is position?

Position is calculated only for Google Search Results.

A Google Search results page is composed of many search result elements. The "position" metric is an attempt to show approximately where on the page a given link was seen, relative to other results on the page. In Search Console, the metric is shown as average position, which averages the position value for all impressions (because the position of the link will be different each time it is seen).

Position in Google Search is typically calculated from top to bottom on the primary side of the page, then top to bottom on the secondary side of the page. (In left-to-right languages, the left is the primary side; in right-to-left languages, the right side is the primary side). Note that this method of calculation might change in the future.

Each element in Search results occupies a single position, whether it contains a single link or many different links or child elements. In most Search results, all links in the element occupy the same position--that of the containing element. However, in a few compound elements, such as List/detail rich results, the position reported might be the position within the container, not the rank of the container itself. Read the details for your specific element type to get more details. If your element type is not described here, assume that the element position level applies to all links within each element.

Here is a schematic diagram of a search results page on a desktop computer, with several types of results:

• Positions 1, 3, 4, 5 are occupied by plain blue links.
• Position 2 is occupied by an AMP carousel (a compound element). This carousel has several AMP results, all of which have position 2
• Position 6 is occupied by a knowledge panel (a compound element). All links in the panel have position 6.

Average position

The position value shown in the Performance report is the topmost position occupied by a link to your property or page in search results, averaged across all queries in which your property appeared.

Example:

1. Query 1 returns your property at positions 2, 4, and 6: its position is counted as 2 (the topmost position).
2. Query 2 returns your property at positions 3, 5, and 9: its position is counted as 3 (the topmost position).
3. The average position across these two queries is (2 + 3)/2 = 2.5.

A link must get an impression for its position to be recorded. If a result does not get an impression—for example, if the result is on page 3 of search results, but the user only views page 1—then its position is not recorded for that query. In some report configurations you might see a dash (-) for the position value. This means that there is no recorded position because the user never saw your property for that query. For example, if you compare desktop and mobile results for a page that has 10 impressions on desktop but none on mobile, you'd see 10 for desktop and - for mobile.

Analyzing your position

The position value is a complex metric that can be misleading if you don't understand the subtleties. For example, in the previous diagram, the knowledge panel in position 6 has the largest value on the page, which might seem bad, but in fact it appears in a very prominent position. Furthermore, in image search, the number of results shown per row and page depends on the width of the screen and other factors, so the position describes only very roughly how far down the image appeared.

For example, here are just a few possible explanations of position value 11 for an element:

• In a desktop search, it could mean the top right side position in a knowledge panel
• In a desktop search, it could mean first item on page 2 (if the first page had 10 items, and nothing on the secondary side)
• In desktop image results, it could mean the second or third row of results (visible without scrolling)
• On mobile image search, it could mean the sixth row of results (visible only with scrolling)

As you can see, a position number can mean different things in different situations, and so you should not make simple assumptions. We recommend that you monitor change in position over time, particularly sudden position changes, as well as absolute position.

Calculating the position

Google Search pages are very complex, and trying to determine a position for any given element is not very straightforward. In Search results, only elements containing at least one non-query-refinement link occupy a position. Elements that have no links, or have only query refinement links, do not occupy a position. For example, a carousel of van Gogh paintings, in which each image opens a "query refinement" (a new Google search) is not counted as a position placeholder, and the carousel presence does not affect the position value of elements below it on the page. If a non-positional carousel had appeared in the example above above the AMP page carousel (at position 2), it would not affect the position values anywhere on the page.

On the other hand, some image thumbnails in the main search page do (eventually) lead to a web page (perhaps after an extra click to expand it), and so count as a position placeholder. For example, a featured snippet has a link to the source property, and so it (typically) occupies position 1. Note that ads do not occupy a search position.

What is a click?

For most result types, any click that sends the user to a page outside of Google Search, Discover, or News is counted as a click; clicking a link that stays inside the Google platform is not counted as a click. (AMP clicks typically open the Google AMP reader, which is considered a click.) See What is a query refinement? for more information about clicks that don't leave Google Search.

Clicking a search result to an outside page, returning, then clicking the same link again counts as only one click. Clicking a different link counts as a click for each link clicked.

Some types of search results count clicks differently; read the documentation for your search element type for more details.

What URL is data assigned to?

Search Console simplifies analyzing your performance data by choosing one canonical URL that represents all variations of a page. These variants include variations by device (desktop or mobile), variant URLs that point to the same page, and possibly even alternate language versions of a page.

Click, impression, and position data for all variations of a page are assigned to the canonical URL that Google selects for each page (although in some cases data might be assigned to the actual URL, rather than the canonical URL). This means that even if you have separate URLs for the mobile and desktop version of a page, all click data will be assigned to the same URL in the Performance report. This way, you don't have to manually add all data for your mobile URLs to the equivalent desktop URLs to see how your page is performing. (Note that you can add a filter in the report to split your data by device or other category, if you choose).

If your website redirects the user to another page after they've landed from Google, that has no effect on the URL assigned the impression or click.

Additional methodology details by result type

Here are additional methodology details about how clicks, impressions, and position are recorded for specific types of results. This list is not exhaustive.