Search Console metrics explained: clicks, impressions, CTR and position

The Search Console performance report has four numbers across the top, and most people watch the wrong one. This is what each of them counts, how they move each other, and which one deserves your attention on a Monday morning.

Clicks

A click is counted when someone clicks a link to your site from a Google search results page. It is the metric closest to a visit, though it will never match your analytics exactly, because the two tools count different things in different ways and some visits never report back.

Clicks are the number to watch. They are what traffic is, they are what a client means when they ask how the site is doing, and they are what every other number on the report exists to explain. QueryWatch’s headline figure, total clicks across your properties this month, is clicks for that reason.

Impressions

An impression is counted when a link to your site appears on a results page that someone loaded. The link does not have to be seen: if your result is at position nine and the searcher never scrolls that far, it still counts, as long as they did not have to click to load more results. For a single search, a page gets at most one impression regardless of how many links to it appear.

Impressions are visibility. They tell you how often Google is showing you at all, which makes them the first thing to check when clicks fall: fewer impressions means you are being shown less, or lower; steady impressions with fewer clicks means you are being shown but not chosen, which is a different problem with a different fix.

Click-through rate

CTR is clicks divided by impressions. It is the metric that tells you whether, given the chance, people chose you.

It is also the one that moves for reasons that have nothing to do with ranking. A rewritten title, a new rich result above you, a date in your snippet that now looks old, or a featured snippet that answers the question before anyone clicks will all move CTR while position holds still. That is why CTR is where the fastest wins live: the fix is on your side of the page, and it takes an afternoon rather than a quarter.

Compare CTR between queries at similar positions, not across the whole report. A brand query at position one will always have a high CTR and will drag the average up; a page that ranks for twenty informational queries at position eight will drag it down, and neither tells you anything about the other.

Average position

Position is the average of the topmost position your site held for each impression. Two things in that sentence cause most of the confusion.

“Topmost” means that if you have results at positions 3 and 8 for the same search, that search counts as position 3. “Average” means that a page showing at position 2 for some searches and position 20 for others reports position 11, which is a number nobody ever actually saw. Average position is a summary, not a rank, and treating it like a rank-tracker number leads to real mistakes. The most common is panicking when average position gets worse because the page started appearing for new, lower-ranking queries: more impressions, worse average, and nothing wrong.

Position is also not the same thing as rank in a rank tracker, which reports a specific result for a specific location and device at a specific time, including for keywords you do not appear for at all. Search Console tells you what Google actually showed, averaged over real searches, and only for queries you were in. Why QueryWatch is not a rank tracker is about that distinction.

How they move each other

A drop in clicks has one of two shapes. Impressions fell too, in which case Google is showing you less, and the question is why: a position change, a competitor, a change in demand, a page dropping out of the index. Or impressions held and CTR fell, in which case Google is still showing you and people have stopped choosing you, and the answer is on the results page, in your title and snippet and whatever now sits above them.

Working out which shape you are looking at is the second step of any investigation. Clicks dropped, now what walks through all of them.

Which one to watch weekly

Clicks, against the previous week. Impressions when clicks move, to see which shape the move has. CTR when you are working on titles and snippets. Position when you are working on a specific query, and only for that query, never as a site-wide average.

The report defaults to showing all four lines on one chart, which is the least useful way to look at them. Pick clicks, compare against the previous period, and only turn the others on when clicks have asked a question. And remember the last two or three days are not finished yet: the data is days behind, for everyone, and a dip at the right-hand edge is usually just a day that has not been counted.