Turbo-charge your website with the Google Search Console Performance Report!

Google Search Console (GSC)

Turbo-charge your website with the Google Search Console Performance Report!

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In the first part of this series of blogs on Google Search Console, we looked at how to set up a Google Search Console account, how to add properties, and the ways in which the property can be verified in order to get started with the Google Search Console.

The Google Search Console gives you various reports, and tools to help you measure your sites’ performance, and better your performance, and rectify errors.

Some of these are: Performance Report, URL Inspection Tool, Coverage Report, Sitemaps Report, Core Web Vitals Report, Mobile Usability Report, AMP Report, Rich Result Report, Security Issues Report, Links Report, AMP Test Tool, Crawl Stats, etc.

We will be looking at some of these features in this series. Let us begin with the Performance Report in this blog.

Google Search Console - Overview

When you open up Google Search Console, you see the Overview page for the selected URL.

The Performance Report gives you important information about the performance of your website on Google Search.

Performance report is divided into three sections: Search, Discover, and News.

All accounts have data on search.

Discover is a feature that feeds the users Google App with their favorite topics, even when they are not actively searching.

So, the Google Search Console also gives you data on how often your site is shown in the users’ Discover along with the size of your traffic, along with the metrics on its performance in discovery.

You can check how the performance of Discover compares with Traditional Search through this report.

The Performance Report data for News, and Discover is only available if your property has enough traffic over these channels to gather data that can be displayed.

You can go to the Performance Reports page from the Navigation Menu on the left, or by clicking “OPEN REPORT” on the Overview page.

Performance Report has three Components 

The Chart, The Table, and the Filters to get more out of the data over the former two.

The Chart

The Chart is the graphic representation of your site metrics.

By selecting the tabs above the chart, you can choose to see Total clicks, Total impressions, Average CTR, or Average Position for your property, or a combination of them.

Clicking to add or remove metrics will update both, the chart, and the table.

Data for Chart is aggregated by property unless you use page filter or Search Appearance.

The Table

The Table displays data for the dimension you select.

Much like the Chart, the Table too is aggregated by property unless you view the result by page or search appearance, or you use filter.

Before we see how to use filters, let us learn about Metrics, and Dimensions.

All the data that Google Search Console (even Analytics, for that matter) shows you is in the form of metrics, and dimensions.

Metrics are quantitative measurements (numerical data) that are the numbers you see for each of the columns of a table or values in the chart. Metrics are the “How much?” or “How many?” components of your data.

Google Search Console Performance Report Chart

Performance Report has four Metrics 

1) Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your property is shown to a prospective customer/audience on the web.

In this case, an impression is the number of times your site was shown in the Search Engine Results Page.

2) Clicks

This is the count of the times someone clicks on your blue link on the SERP to land on one of your pages.

3) Average CTR

The average click-through rate is the percentage of clicks with respect to the impressions.

4) Average Position

The average position your site held on the SERP.

Dimensions are attributes or the labels used to describe the data.

Dimensions are the “What?” components of your data.

Click on the dimensions row to see your site’s metrics for the specific dimensions you want to view.

Google Search Console Performance Report Table

Dimensions in the Performance Report 

Queries

Shows the Search Queries that led people to your pages.

  • If you find that your Queries list is missing certain keywords that you are expecting should lead to your pages, it is highly likely that your site does not have enough useful content that is relevant to what people are searching, for those particular keywords.
  • If the CTR is low while the impressions are in good number, you should consider changing titles, and snippets (the blue text in the SERP that links to your page is the title, while the extra information below the title are the snippets.)

Pages

The pages that were shown in search or were clicked are shown here along with the metrics associated with them.

The metrics are shown for canonical pages, i.e., if you have any duplicate pages, only one of them will see incremental click counts.

If the pages in your site, that are important according to you, are not in the pages list, those pages might have problems. Use Inspect URL tool to understand what is wrong, and rectify the error(s).

Countries

This dimension shows the countries where the searches originated that led to your pages on the SERP.

The metrics associated with this dimension will help you understand how effective your efforts are in reaching your target audience that is in specific countries.

Devices

This dimension gives you data about the type of devices your search audience uses.

For e.g., more people are likely to land on a restaurant’s website through search query “restaurants nearby” on their phones than their desktops, and so your mobile site better be good for their phones!

Search Appearance

This dimension helps you understand how your rich results are performing on Search.

Rich results are those results (at the top of the SERP) with extra information or imagery. These may be results with images, videos, and other forms of results that go beyond just text.

Dates

All the data in this field is grouped by the date in Pacific Time Zone (PT).

This is very important for sorting your data, and to learn about trends that are time specific.

Search Type (Filter)

This helps you segment data on the basis of Search type, i.e., whether it was Web result (displayed under “All” in the results), Image, Video, or News.

The Filters

The Filters in the Performance report will help you make the most out of the data. By applying Filters to your data, you can have a better hang on how your site is performing on Search by helping you explore complex, and more targeted scenarios.

i.e., you can explore very specific scenarios using Filters.

Filters are located above the Chart.

Google Search Console Performance Report Filters

You need to feed in/select three variables to set up custom Filters:

Dimension: The Dimension you want to set the filter to (Queries, Pages, Countries, etc.)

Constraint: This is used to indicate the range for the values (equal to, not equal to, including, and excluding the value.)

Value: This is the value around which the filter is constructed. i.e., the value that you want included or excluded.

All the dimensions can be accessed for constructing a filter by clicking the + NEW button, apart from Search type, and Date, which are preset functions located beside the + NEW button.

You also get to use a comparison filter for certain dimensions in the Performance Report.

For example, let us look at Device filter for this…

Select “Device” after clicking on + NEW to select filter dimensions,

Google Search Console Performance Report Device Filter

Now select the “COMPARE” tab, and select the types of devices you want to compare the data for.

Google Search Console Performance Report Compare Filter

Click on “APPLY”, and you will see data comparison for the types of devices you selected.

You may also set filters directly by clicking specific dimensions (row in the table).

For example, if you click on “India” under the Countries dimension, you will set the filter to show you data for only that country.

Filters are essential tools that will help you measure your progress towards the goals that you seek to achieve, and accordingly help you with data, and insights for you to make strategies.

You can start playing around with filters to analyze the Performance Report data, and get a better hang of them for your specific purposes.

How do you use the Google Search Console’s Performance Report? Are there any customized filters that you use for your work?

In the next parts of this series, we will look at some other features of the Google Search Console.

Previous Post
How to set up your Google Search Console and verify website?
Next Post
Advantage of Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool for improved webpages

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