Get to Know Google: New Search Impact Report

We were selected to be a “Trusted Tester” for Google Webmaster Tools newest addition, the Search Impact report (currently in Alpha)!  In the world of marketing, what could be better than having access to more data? We’re super excited and we want to share a few of the new features with you!

The Search Impact Report allows you to break down your site’s:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Click through rate (CTR)
• Average position

Using different dimensions, including:

• Date
• Countries
• Devices
• Search Type (web, image, video)

The best part is you can actually combine and compare several dimensions to get more granular data. (Who doesn’t Love MORE data?)

Let’s take a look at a few screen shots:

In this first shot we are looking at search queries from the last 7 days compared the previous 7 days. We have chosen to look at clicks and average position. The ability to compare data on one screen is a huge improvement to GWT!

As always with Google Webmaster Tools, you can zero in on any of the results for a detailed chart. Below, you will see that we clicked on ‘fashion marketing’.

Next, we’ll take a look at a new feature that allows you to compare metrics by devices. Here, we are taking a look at total clicks for 28 days on a desktop computer compared to mobile devices.

The report also allows you to filter by several different factors which will come in handy for content creators and SEOs as it makes it easy to narrow in on specific topics within your site. In the next screenshot we have chosen to look at clicks and impressions from the last 90 days for only URLs that contain ‘fashion’.

You can drill down even further too! We added filters to the same report as above to get more detailed information. We now have the clicks and impressions for URLs containing ‘fashion’ narrowed to mobile traffic from the United States! Are you as excited as we are?

Our initial opinion of this report is that it’s a really great upgrade for Google Webmaster Tools, probably one of the best we’ve seen thus far. We’ve only just started to experiment with it, but feel the biggest benefit seems to be the fact that we can get granular data faster without having to cross compare with Analytics. We also believe that in the future, the mobile portion will most likely be the most valuable as there is a lot of talk in the SEO world about upcoming mobile algorithm updates.
In the end, we are super excited to learn more about it and provide Google with our feedback. We promise to keep you updated…Stay Tuned!