Understanding Average Position in Google Anaylitics

[fablau]

Hello here,

I have a question about the Queries report under "Search Engine Optimization" in Google Analytics: is the "Average Position" information a reliable one? I have a lot of queries that appear, from that report, to average first position, but when I verify that on Google by connecting anonymously, I can't even find my result on the first page! To me, that information is worthless and makes me think all the rest of that report is unreliable. If anyone can help me to understand it, I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you in advance for any thoughts.

[fablau]

Thank you Dimitrii for clarifying how it works, what you describe makes sense even though it is still worthless for me.

Thank you again for your help, appreciated.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, yes, quite honestly, i don't use that metric at all. The way it works is explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6155685?hl=en and here is a moz post on the accuracy: https://moz.com/ugc/testing-the-accuracy-of-avg-position-for-search-queries-in-google-webmaster-tools

The problem is that it's literally average. for all phrases it ever ranked for, all locations, devices etc. So, if somebody searched with some weird configuration and the page ranked number one, even if that page ranks #100 for everybody else, the average rank will be #50, see the picture?

hope this helps