Recently, John Mueller of Google discussed the discrepancies in Search Console query reports and why page and site level reports show different numbers of search queries than the search console query report displays.
Query reports lists the Google Search queries that generated impressions of your website URLS in Google organic search results. The number of impressions that each page generates and the average position of impressions let you understand how well the search engine correlates your content to user queries. Clicks and click-through rate let you understand how well users correlate the search results with their intentions.
Here is the question asked:
“In Search Console, when look at the pages report, I click on one page that has 241 clicks.
I click on the queries report and the queries add up to 148.
Do we attribute this to the anonymized queries mentioned in the Help Center?”
John Muller responded with this:
“Yes, usually that’s the case. So in particular, when you look at the page level, we can show you all of the information in Search Console.
And that is because there’s nothing kind of unique about the individual page requests.
But when it comes to queries, there are queries that have only very limited use.
And we would not show those necessarily in Search Console.
That means when you look at the report, you’ll see on the one hand, the number on top of the report, where it says like total impressions or total clicks. 30:40
And you can look at the individual impressions and clicks for each individual query.
And sometimes when you add up the table, it doesn’t match up.
And that’s essentially due to us dropping those queries that are kind of anonymized queries.
And that’s kind of the differences that you would see there.
So in Search Console, if you look at it on a page level, you’ll see slightly different numbers than on a per-query level.
And on a query-level when you look at the table itself, you might see slightly different numbers than the summary on top.
And from our point of view, if you want to look at the individual queries, then the query-level data is definitely useful.
But if you want to see the full picture of the impressions to the site, then you kind of want to look at the page-level or the site-level results and use that for tracking the trends and changes over time.”
Check out the full video this was question and answer was included in below. The question was asked at the 29:47 minute mark.
