Impressions in Google Analytics
-
I am trying to compare SERP impressions in Google Analtyics between two different time periods.
I want to compare the last two months, with the previous two months.
Now this works fine when I go to Traffic Sources > SEO > Queries.
Our analytics has been set up since early last year, so I cannot understand why, for a couple of weeks at the start of the previous two months, it is showing that I have less than 10 impressions per day, then in one day, it jumps to 22,000 impressions, and starts to show 'real' information after that...
Very frustrating when I am trying to show how effective my work has been.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
-
Worth a try, thanks!!
It will be far better when i have a full year of data
-
Miranda,
I am sure Doug is correct as to the reason for the "spike."
Now, a work around could be found in Places, especially if you did some work around their local. You could look at who is looking and coming to the site, etc. Keywords, etc.
I would certainly give that a try as well.
Best -
How about going into TRAFFIC SOURCES, All Traffic.
Set the Secondary Dimention to Traffic Sources / Keyword
Select the keyword you wish to plot from the list. and click the plot rows button.
You can plot a couple of keywords to do comparisons over time...
-
I feel your pain!
Without the historic data it's difficult to see what impact you've had. Maybe now Analytics is receiving this data it'll give us more history to go by - once enough time has passed to make it relevant.
-
webmaster tools kills me, I have to keep downloading the data every two weeks or so as they keep moving the history goal posts.
have never actually got round to trying to compare the data though
-
Not just seasonality. Our brand name is our main keyword. So even though we have had a huge jump in traffic, a lot of people come directly to the site. So in Jan it looks like our SEO is doing worse than before. We infact we are now targeting/appearing/and getting clicks for hundreds more keywords than before.
-
That looks the same as mine - think this just related to the date when the SEO data was made available in Google analytics.
You can't get historic information from Google Webmaster tools either can you.
-
Great thinking, seasonality didn't come top mind - I'll have to remember that. Possibly give you a heads up for developing niches that you should be targetting more directly too I guess.
"Then in one day, it jumps to 22,000 impressions" which seems a a bit extreme though. Once things settle down, what's the average impressions/day? Was it JUST impressions that went silly on that one day, how did this relate to clicks/average ranking?
Can you tie changes to your impressions to activity on your site?
-
This shows just as much seasonality.
Our site is very busy in Jan for instance. 1 keyword term that we always rank number 1 for, from before I started and still today... returned 6,000 vistis in first two months, and only 2,000 in last two months. Even though this term is definately appearing top in all searches.
It is quite hard to show the impact of your work sometimes on a big website I find
-
and guys, I am not trying to show total impressions, as I realised this in not accurate for what I want to show. What I am trying to show is how many impressions & click throughs we are getting from ceratin keywords, in comparison to the past.
-
-
Looking at organic search traffic too.
Impressions are great for showing the difference from appearing on page 2 to appearing on page 1.
Is there anyway to compare over time, the percentage of overall traffic that a keyword has sent. So at the minute I can see a keyword, how many visits it has sent in a given time period and how many visits it sent in the compared time period. I see a percentage change - But this change does not take into account the seasonality of my searchers. I want to see a percentage change of visits from the keyword with regards to 'total visits'
(october 11th is when my impressions start)
-
Doug,
Overall, I agree and good thinking. The other issue is impressions can be more influenced by seasonality, etc. I think she would be better served looking at site visits and the associated keywords along with time on site, and bounce rate, conversions, etc.
If she has 3 terms around widgets: Blue widgets, Green turtle widgets, and moving purple lion widgets that were all fully active during a given period, she can compare apples to apples in each time span.
Best
Edit: And I would still like to see a screen shot.
-
Miranda, Is there any way you can send a screen shot or two? I am having a bit of trouble getting what is going on in my mind.
How does the data look for the first two month period compared to the second? -
What date range are you looking at? My SEO Queries data in Google Analytics only became available in the middle of September.
Before that it looks like 0 impressions.
How sure are you that this is going to give you the evidence you need to show how effective you work has been?
Impressions are just going to show you the number of races you're running - not how well you've performed? It'll give you a view as to how broad your content is a feel for your long-tail.
You've already taking a look at organic search traffic over time?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Whatstuffwherebot user agent messing up Google Analytics
Starting yesterday, Aug 26, 2020, I noticed a new bot crawling our site with user agent whatstuffwherebot. Google Analytics is counting these hits as human traffic, completely throwing off my numbers - yesterday, Analytics reported nearly triple my typical number of visitors. As of now, Search Console only shows data through Aug 25 so I don't know if Search Console is also affected. Is anybody else seeing something similar? Does anybody know what the whatstuffwherebot bot is? I don't get any results when I search on Google or Bing. For what it's worth, the traffic is coming from Columbus, OH, running over Amazon AWS via 278 different IP addresses so far. Also, WordFence (my WordPress security plugin) correctly identifies these hits as bot traffic.
Reporting & Analytics | | ahirai0 -
When Deployment done for my site in google analytic page views little bit affected
Hello Expert, For my ecommerce site every minute I have 500 visitors now when my development team do deployment like minor JS update where site restart not require then what I found is on website (front end) not able to find anything happen that means visitor not event realize page even refresh but in analytic real time it shows minor pageviews down. So can anyone guess here what happen actually in this case as per google? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | micey1230 -
UTM Links Showing Up as Separate Pages in Google Analytics
Hey everyone, I was just looking at landing pages in Google Analytics, and in addition to just the URL of the landing page, the UTM links are being listed as separate pages. Is this normal? I anticipated seeing the landing page URL and then using the secondary dimension to see source/medium. If this isn't normal, what would I check next?
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
Buffer Link and Google Impressions
Afternoon, I noticed a spike in impressions over a couple of days in April, so I investigated Analytics to see where these were coming from. It appears these impressions were split between two URLs; one was a blog post, the other was the Buffer link to the blog post that we used on Twitter and Facebook. According to Analytics, this Buffer URL received 1000 impressions over two days, with an average SERP position of 16. This surely can't be right, can it? Is this just another Analytics quirk? After two days of a decent amount of impressions to this Buffer link, the amount of impressions dropped to pretty much zero. I know Tweets are now starting to rank, but this would be the Twitter URL, not the Buffer link to our blog post? Any ideas, Cheers, Lewis
Reporting & Analytics | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
AHHH... Google Analytics just changed!
There's now an acquisitions tab.. but I can't figure out how to sort referral traffic by referral path.
Reporting & Analytics | | S.S.N0 -
No option to connect to google analytics!
I figured it out had to click on the pencil icon. On GA looks like this http://orlandocouponsfree.com - http://orlandocouponsfree.comUA-9313894-1orlandocouponsfree.combut url is http://www.orlandocouponsfree.com/Is this an issue? When I tried to connect to google analytics yesterday. There was a connection issue with Moz & GA. I refreshed page hoping it would help. Now it won't let me choose domain. When I view campaign it says I should connect properties. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/jkJ0ZdF.png[/IMG] I click link and get to this page which doesn't provide my an option. http://analytics.moz.com/settings/campaign/89561.117561 [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/jkJ0ZdF.png[/IMG]
Reporting & Analytics | | touristips0 -
Google Analytics Custom Reports eMails only one reporting tab
Goog Morning from 18 degrees C mostly cloudy Wetherby UIK 🙂 I'm on a mission to get away from manual reporting and move over to eMailing custom Google analytics reports. Thanks to this tutorail http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2175001/7-Time-Saving-Google-Analytics-Custom-Reports Ive made good progress but ive hit a snag. The snag being when i email the report the recipient only recieves one 1 report tab of data. This causes a problem when you eMail a report that has multiple reporting tabs like this: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/tab-export-custom-problemcopy.jpg So my question is please..."When you eMail a recipient a custom report how can you ensure they receive "All" the reporting tabs data and not just one"? Any insights welcome 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing0 -
Google Analytics Best Practice Set up for Clients
Hi When setting up new Google Analytics accounts for clinets what is the preferred/best practice. At present we have our own company google account and add new clinets this way (to our account) - the disadvantage with this, we can only grant them limited account access otherwise they would be able to view all the accounts we cretaed. Plus we can't link their adwords to the GA account we cretaed them. Is it best practice to set the client up with their own Google Account and then we just link to their account. Advise would be appreciated, thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | daracreative0