Get more understanding of your search performance metrics

The Google Search Console calculates metrics differently for keywords and pages. For keywords, data is aggregated by property, and for URLs, data is aggregated by page.

This means that when more than one URL is displayed and clicked for a certain keyword or search query, the Keywords and Pages reports in Ryte Search Success can show different numbers for clicks and impressions. That’s why, in the graph "Real Google Visibility" (visible in all reports), and in the Keyword report columns, users now see the label "Searches" rather than "impressions" for greater accuracy and understanding of the performance metrics.

For example:

A user searches for "indexable content", and there are two pages ranking:

How to Make Sure Your Website Content is Indexable

What is Indexable?: Check if Web Content is Indexable

The Keyword report shows 1 impression, and the Pages report shows 1 impression per URL, therefore a total of 2 impressions.

Keyword report: 1 impression
Pages report: 2 impressions

The user then clicks on both pages. The Keywords report shows 1 click, as the keyword "indexable content" was only clicked once. The Pages report shows 2 clicks, as each page was clicked on once.

Keyword report: 1 click
Pages report: 2 clicks

For keywords metrics, the GSC aggregates the data by property. How many times was a keyword searched for? How often did at least one result get a click for a keyword? Even if the user clicked on more than one URL for the keyword, only one click will be displayed.

For pages, the GSC aggregates the data by page. How many results were displayed in the SERPs? How many times did a user click on a search result? Therefore, every click on a page will be counted as a click.

To avoid confusion, in the Keyword reports, where data is aggregated by property, we now display the label "searches" rather than "impressions". This represents more accurately how the metrics are calculated.

The best way to observe the described difference is with brand keywords: here you can see how they are 171 searches for a brand keyword, while the number of impressions of single pages (due to multiple rankings) is much higher.

How the Google Search Console aggregates search performance metrics is described in more detail here.

Happy Optimizing!