Top Search Queries report deconstructed

Those people at Google working on Webmaster Tools have been keeping everyone pretty busy recently with new toys to play with and now they’ve announced an exciting update to the Top Search Queries report.

  • You can see the total number of impressions, clickthroughs and a clickthrough% for your keywords.
  • You can see the data for a range of rankings including positions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-10, 2nd page and 3rd page +.
  • You can see the data for the top 20 landing pages
  • The number of keywords has been increased from 100 to 5000+
  • They have added a Search filter function so you can quickly drill down to the keywords you want.
  • You can select a date range for the data

When you export, you only get the total figures for each keyword but it’s not really a problem as the interface is pretty easy to use.

Using the date selection tool you can quickly establish that the data is included up to the last 2 days which makes it pretty useful for all except the fastest paced industries like new publishing.

What Can You Do With It?

Here are a few quick ideas about how you can actually put this new information to good use.

  1. The Impression figure when combined with Clicks allows the calculation of the click-through-rate which can give you valuable information about the differences between search terms.
  2. You can test changing description tags and measure the impact by comparing the clickthrough% for the different date ranges.
  3. You can get a deeper understanding into the ranking distribution for keywords. It’s possible to get this from analytics if you’ve set up the necessary filters but this is a much easier way to do it. The different selection of rankings and ranges is a nice way to organise the information. This could be useful to help show people why they shouldn’t trust what they see in their own browser.
  4. The landing page data is already available in analytics so it’s not really adding much but you are getting an impression share of each landing page and its effectiveness. If you can spot competing landing pages but with different click-through-rates, you might make an alteration or remove one page completely.

Data Accuracy

Before you get carried away with the data, it’s worth considering the accuracy.

Looking at a scattergraph plot of clickthroughs against actual visits from analytics shows very little correlation.

The Clickthrough data for landing pages looked more promising. The chart below shows the Clickthroughs for top landing pages for a main brand phrase against analytics data and the fit looks pretty good.

By examining the data for key brand terms and comparing to the data from analytics, we were able to establish that the Clickthrough figure includes data from the Sitelinks. However, the impression share figures do not appear to include the Sitelinks data and are only including the impressions of the alternate and double listings. Magnus Nilsson has reported that the click data from Social search is also being included but the impression data is probably not included. This makes the clickthrough% figures for landing pages to be particularly inaccurate.

Unfortunately it appears that the impression figures are too inaccurate to be of any use and this also then applies to the clickthrough %.

Conclusion

This is a most promising update to Webmaster Tools which shows a positive change towards developing tools that are genuinely useful but unfortunately it has been spoiled by poor quality data.

Edit: Tom at Distilled agrees with us about the accuracy issues.


Posted on April 15, 2010 at 2:10 pm by chris · Permalink
In: Analytics, Natural search, Webmaster Tools

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