What Are Impressions, Position, And Clicks

Impressions

Impressions measure your performance on Google. If you use a site hosting service such as Squarespace or Wix, your hosting service might provide you with a dashboard or plugin that shows your site’s search performance. Search the internet for “Squarespace analytics” or “Wix SEO” to find out what tools your site provider offers.

Some site hosts are integrated with Search Console. You can explore information about how your site performs on Google Search, including impressions, clicks, and average position:

• Impressions: How many times your site has been seen by someone searching on Google.
• Clicks: How many times someone has clicked a link to your site in search results.
• Average position: The average position of your site in search results (where position 1 is the top position).

If you’re adventurous, you can use Search Console for other reasons, like to see if there’s an error that might prevent Google from understanding your site. You can also send us your most important URLs to let us know we should crawl and potentially index them. 

What URL is my 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.

An impression is the number of times a link is displayed on the search results page, if there is a link at the bottom of the results page and the user does not scroll to the bottom of the page, in which case it is considered an impression. Impression is for a website. An impression is different from a CRT because for an Impression the user does not need to click the sitelink to count the impression, and only the sitelink is displayed on the results page when in the CRT the user has to click the link.

Through the Search Console, you can go to the Performance section and then to the Search Results section to see Impressions at a glance. It should be noted that the Search Console only includes reports of regular impression network visits and does not provide any information about ad clicks.

If a search item includes multiple links, impressions for the site and URLs are registered differently. For example, suppose the knowledge diagram includes five URLs for your site, then the data grouped by site will count only one impression, and the data grouped by page will log five pages with one impression.

Role of Impressions in SEO

Valuable keywords have a big impact on website optimization. Search, if you have created content related to these words, then the content of your website can be shown to users, this of course depends on the ranking of your site in the search results on the results page, in order to get high rankings with related keywords, it must also ensure quality, relevant and of course updated content to attract more users and get high organic traffic to your site thanks to these benefits.

In order to create more popular content for users, you have to pay attention to different points, for example, you can browse other pages to conclude the users’ favourite topics, and with SEO-related articles, you can try to improve the ranking of your site, simply.

After a while, besides the number of impressions, you can also increase your site’s CTR and remember that the combination of click-through rate and number of impressions can be amazing and effectively match your website.

Clicks

Any clicks that are sending the user to a page outside of Google Search are counted as a click. If the click stays inside search results, it’s not counted.

Going back to search results after clicking and clicking back only counts as one click. Multiple click behaviors depends on the type of search results.

What is a query refinement?

If you click on a link within Search results that performs a new query, this is called a query refinement. For example, if you search for “cat breeds” the results might include a gallery of photos of different breeds. Clicking one of the images in the gallery performs a new query for the chosen breed.

Similarly, if you search for “fat cats” in the default web view, then switch to the image results view, (or video results, or news results, or any other result type), each time you change your view you are performing a query refinement.

If a link is a query refinement link, clicks and impressions are not counted for that link. This makes sense if you think about it: the owner of the query refinement link’s target page is… Google! Only clicks or impressions that (eventually) lead out of the search results page can log clicks or impressions in Search Console.

If a user follows a query refinement link they are essentially performing the new query shown in the search terms box. All impression, position, and click data in the new result page are counted as coming from this new user query.

 Position

Average position is the numerical order in which Google displays a URL in search results. According to Google, “Position is calculated from top to bottom on the primary side of the page, then top to bottom on the secondary side of the page.”

There are certain SERP features, like AMP carousels, where Google features multiple pages in a single section. In cases like this, all URLs in a single element are counted in the same position.

“Average” position also means that this metric doesn’t represent exactly where you rank on the page at a precise time. If your URL appeared in position 3 one day, 7 the next day, and 4 the next day, the URL would show an average position of 4.6.

The Search Console Average Position report provides a combination graph, table and Average CTR page total detailing the number of Keywords per Average Position from Google search results. 

The Average Position, number of Keywords, total Impressions, Clicks and an average Click-thru-Rate in either Google Web, News, Images or Videos Search queries is presented in a graph and sortable table.

In order for the data to display in the report an appropriate Report Sections in the Display setting under Report Options have to be set. The default filter is set from 1 to 10 of the Average Positions to be displayed. Data can be exported to CSV and PDF.  Please note that there can be a 3 to 5 day delay between the time Google compiles and releases this data via their API.

Checking Average Position

Impressions are heavily dependant on the results page, but clicks are dependent on the rank position. If you show up on page one of the Google search results, you’re getting all of the impressions for the search. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in position #1 or position #10; the same number of people are landing on that page of search results, so the impressions are the same.

This section is part of the reporting where Google doesn’t have a ton of nuance. They could add screen tracking to the search results pages to track impressions that only see the top 2-3 results and never scroll down. They likely won’t because it’s a ton of overhead for them to follow, for minimal benefit.

So, what you want to check is what your landing pages list as “average position.” The average position is the place in the search results you end up in most commonly.

• If your average position is 40+, you’re on page 4+ of the search results and may as well be invisible.
• If your average position is 11-39, you’re on pages 2-4 of the search results, and while you’ll get some traffic, most people don’t venture here.
• If your average position is 6-10, you’re in the bottom half of the first page of results. Good, but in the realm of needs improvement.
• If your average position is 1-5, you’re in the top results, which is a great place to be. If you have distressingly low click-throughs for your ranking, that’s another problem.

Compare your average position to the click-through rates for that position, and see where you stand. If you’re not on the first page, you have work to do before this kind of optimization is necessary. If you’re on the front page, you can start paying attention to these issues more closely.