Analyzing performance on Google Search

The Search Control Performance reports are powerful tools to help you analyze your site's presence and results on Google.

It provides a wide range of data and analytical capabilities to help you get the most out of Search, Discover and News.

I'm Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google.

In this video, I'll talk about everything you need to know when analyzing your performance using Search Console.

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When you log into Search Console, you'll find up to three Performance reports in the navigation.

Search Results provides you data for Google Search impressions, clicks and positions.

That includes Search, Image, Video and News tabs.

Discover shows data from Google Discover, such as impressions and clicks for specific pages.

This report is visible only if your property has reached a minimum number of impressions in Discover.

News shows data from news.google.com

and from the Google News app on Android and iOS.

It doesn't include the News tab in Google Search, which is covered in the Search Results report I just mentioned, when filtered to include the new search type.

This report is visible only if your property has reached a minimum number of impressions in Google News.

The reports are very similar, but since Search Results has a few additional capabilities, we'll focus on it.

If you want to learn more about terms like queries, clicks and impressions, take a few minutes to watch my video on Search Console Insights.

In that video, I give an overview on how to get started with Search Console using the Insights report.

We're now in the Search Results Performance report, and you can see three main elements: the data controls and filters, the chart area, and the table section.

I find it intuitive to go through them in this order.

In general, before you look at data, you should make sure you understand what you're looking at.

Then, you have a quick overview of what the data tells you, and that's always a graph.

Last, you go into details to learn what to do with the data.

Data controls, chart, tables.

The first data control is the date range.

The default is the last three months, but you can quickly change to check the last 28 days, seven days or 24 hours, where you can see an hourly breakdown.

You can also click more to find other preset time ranges or set your own custom dates.

There are two details to keep in mind.

All dates are shown in Pacific time, with the exception of the 24-hour view, where the data is shown in your local time, based on your browser setting.

By default, we show only complete days, so if you want to see data from today or yesterday, you should use the custom date selector.

It's usually interesting to compare different dates to learn how you're performing over time.

For that, you can use the Compare mode, where you have several preset options to choose from, or you can set your own dates.

For example, if you're checking last month's data, you might want to compare it to the previous month, or to the same month last year.

This can help you understand if there are any big changes in pages, queries or countries driving traffic to your website.

Another important data control is the Search type.

By default, your charts will show only Web, which is what we call the main tab on Google Search.

It's a good practice to check how you're doing on other tabs, too, like Image, Video and News.

If you have traffic originating from these tabs, they'll be available to you through this data control.

You can also choose two search types to compare.

Here, you can see a comparison between Web and Image.

You can analyze how queries and pages' performance differ between them.

There are many other types of filters available to help you analyze your search traffic performance.

Before I move on to talk about the beautiful line chart, let me give one last example that I find particularly interesting.

When you create a query filter, you can look at queries containing, or not, a certain word or group of words.

You also have the option to analyze Branded and Non-branded queries.

Branded queries are those that mention your site's brand, domain or brand-specific products and services, including common misspellings.

Non-branded queries are those that don't mention them.

We'll talk a little more about this when we talk about the tables below the chart.

The first thing you need to know about the chart is that you can choose the metrics you want to see, including impressions, clicks, average click-through rate, or CTR, and average position.

To do so, click the metrics themselves to add or remove them from the chart.

If you add or remove a metric from the chart, it will also update the table below.

Just looking at the shape of the line will tell you a lot about your audience and your performance in general.

In this case, you can see this site is searched for significantly more during weekdays than weekends.

That's because it's part of Google's Developer documentation, which is mostly read when professionals are working.

Usually, it's not a weekend pastime.

In addition, you can monitor drops or spikes in traffic and start your journey to understand them.

For more on that, check out our documentation on debugging drops in Search traffic.

I know I'm not supposed to have favorite features, but I do.

One of them is the custom chart annotations.

I think adding annotations to your chart is a great way to add context on what's happening with your site that might be affecting your Search traffic.

You can use them to mark important things, such as when you launch a new feature or fix a bug on your website.

To add an annotation, right-click the chart on the specific date you want to annotate.

Make sure the date is correct using the date picker.

Type your note in the text field and click "Add."

Annotations will appear for everyone with access to this property, which could include others at your company or vendors that have been given access by the property owner.

You'll see them regardless of what filters you apply, but they won't show up in comparison mode or 24-hour views.

After you get a quick overview from your performance chart, it's time to dive in.

The tables will enable you to understand exactly what happens to your performance.

You can check queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearances and specific dates.

Here are some ideas on what to look for when analyzing your data.

If search queries you expect to see don't appear, your site might not have enough useful content relevant to those queries.

If important pages on your site aren't in the Pages list, there might be an issue with them.

In that case, you should use Inspect URL to find out why.

Check out the links in the description to learn more.

If the number of impressions is significantly higher than clicks, or in other words, if the CTR is very low for a query or a page, you could consider adding images or structured data to your pages to make them more attractive to Search users.

Use the Branded and Non-branded filter to check queries that mention or not your site's brand, domain or brand-specific products and services, including common misspellings.

This might show interesting areas where people are searching for your content directly related to your brand.

Those are just a few examples of what information you can learn from the Performance tables, but the sky is the limit.

I hope you learned a few tricks to monitor and analyze your performance on Google.

In summary, make sure you understand what data you're looking at using data controls.

Take a quick look at what the data tells you using the line chart, and dive deep into details to learn what to do with the data using tables.

Data controls, charts, tables.

Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube channel to be the first to watch our upcoming videos.

Stay tuned.

Whose phone is that?

Ah oh...

John, I told you I'm recording today!

No, no, I'm not talking about ranking.

No, I'm not talking about Trends today, I'm talking about Search Console.

Yes, Search Console.

You know, the line charts, bar charts?

No, no pie charts, John.

It does-- no, it doesn't depend.

No pie charts.

Okay, John, I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?

Bye!