Over the years, Google search has been the most used search engine for most users. Google Search performance data is widely used data in Search Console using both methods, and it can be the Search Analytics API or the performance report if you want to know something about how Google processes data, privacy filtering, restrictions, etc. Read on to find out how it all works.
Table of Contents
Basics of Search Performance
Most of us are constantly looking for things in a search engine, but have you ever wondered how it all works? Performance data has four metrics that show how search traffic has changed over time. Check them out below:
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- Clicks: Counting user clicks from Google search results.
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- Impressions: Counting the number of times users have seen your property in Google search results.
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- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The number of clicks that were by the number of impressions.
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- Position: Position of search results for URLs, queries, or for a website.
You can analyze these metrics in many ways. See how each search query, page, country, device, or skin is driving traffic to your site. You can use this analysis to look at performance. Moreover, if you want to get the best SEO services in Karachi for your business or company, you can contact us right now.
Access to search performance data includes the product interface, Search Analytics API, Looker Studio connector, and tables. You can use this media to access performance data.
However, if you use the product interface, the dimensions are through filters or dimension tables with graphs. You will need to analyze the metrics as they will be displayed in the graphs.
Limiting and filtering data
The data in the reporting interface and the data that is exported is aggregated and filtered in many other different ways. Check the data restrictions below:
Privacy filtering
Some queries, commonly known as anonymized, are not included in Search Console data to protect the privacy of the user entering the query.
These are questions that will not be asked by more than a dozen users over a period of two to three months. For privacy reasons, legitimate queries will not appear in Search performance data. This is why they are known as anonymized queries. Real anonymized queries are always passed from tables. However, you can find them in the chart totals by filtering by query.
Take this as an example to make it clear that it only takes into account privacy filtering as well as the daily data line limits next to it. It will play a role in this chart. The table below shows the traffic for queries to your website. This is a breakdown of traffic from non-anonymized queries. Normally, a traditional website will have four or more itemized, non-anonymized queries.
Most of the time the chart shows individual clicks and later adds clicks from anonymized queries. Whenever you use Search Console reports, you’ll notice this type of discrepancy in two ways:
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- There will be no line for anonymized queries in the overview table or in the API. If you think you’re going to add up the clicks from each row, you won’t be able to find the same number of clicks as the total in the chart. For example, when counting rows, you’ll be looking at 450 clicks, but the total graph will be more than 500.
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- Anonymized queries are forwarded whenever you apply a filter. You’ll find the difference between the sum of clicks in the total graph compared to the sum of clicks that contain (some_string) and those that don’t (some_string).
Daily limit of data lines
Limitations are related to server latency, storage, processing resources, and more. Search Console has a limit on the amount of data that can be displayed or exported. These restrictions do not actually affect most services in Search Console. Some of the very large websites are affected by this. However, the remaining data of these large sites will be large enough to form a representative data sample.
The maximum you can export through the Search Console UI is 1000 rows of data. Currently, the current limit for data exported via the Search Analytics API or Looker Studio connector is 50,000 rows per day per site and search type. This is the highest and cannot be attained in any way. There must be a reason they left 50,000 rows with a higher ceiling.
You can use (rowLimit) to increase to 25,000 and (startRow) to pull rows from 25,001 to 50,000.
To Wrap Up
To summarize, you are almost aware of all things related to Search Console performance data. Now you know about the four metrics, product interface, Search Analytics API, Looker Studio and much more about Search Console. You can do all this according to your needs.
