Performance report (Search results): Common tasks and use cases

This guide explains how to perform common tasks in the Performance report, such as finding top content, assessing page effectiveness, and measuring brand awareness.

Identifying top content

To identify your top-performing content, you'll first need to understand how to configure the report and use different dimensions and filters to segment your data. You should also be aware of how data is aggregated when switching between property and page views.

Find your most popular queries

To see the Search queries that bring the most traffic to your site:

1. Click the Queriestab.
2. Sort by Clicks, CTR(click-through rate), or Impressionsby clicking the column heading at the top of the table.

Find your most popular pages

To see which pages on your site receive the most traffic from Google Search:

1. Click the Pagestab.
2. Choose the Clicksmetric.
3. Sort your results by clicks to see pages that get the most traffic.

When viewing the Pages tab, the table data is aggregated by page , which means totals may differ from the property-level totals shown in the chart.

Measuring brand awareness

The branded and non-branded queries filter in the Performance reporthelps you analyze your site's traffic by separating it into two distinct groups. This feature helps you measure brand awareness and identify opportunities for growth.

• Branded queries:Search queries that include your brand name, domain, or a brand-specific product or service. This includes common misspellings and variations.
• Non-branded queries:Search queries that don’t include your brand name. These searches are often more general.

Differentiating between these types of queries can help you understand your Search performance. Branded traffic often comes from users already familiar with your site, while non-branded traffic can indicate new audience growth.

How to use the filter

1. Click the filter bar and select the Queryfilter.
2. Choose either Brandedor Non-brandedfrom the filter options to view your data.

Assessing page effectiveness

Identify low CTR pages

A low CTR can indicate that users see your page in Search results but don’t think it answers their query. This is a good way to determine a page's effectiveness in Search.

To see your lowest CTR pages:

1. Select CTRas your metric by clicking the scorecard on top of the chart.
2. Open the Pagestab.
3. Sort the table by CTR(ascending).

If you see a low CTR for a page, consider updating the page's title and description to better represent the content, or adjust the content to align better with the queries that show the page. For more reasons why your data might not look as expected, see troubleshooting data discrepancies .

See pages shown for a specific query

To view the specific pages from your site that Google has shown for a given query:

1. Click the Queriestab.
2. Click a query in the table to filter all report data to the selected query.
3. View the Pagestab to see which URLs were shown.

Track position history

To see your average position history for a specific page or group of pages:

1. If necessary, add a URL filter to the report to focus on the page(s) you’re interested in.
2. Select the Average positionmetric and deselect all other metrics.
3. Choose the time frame you want to analyze.
4. Optionally, compare this time frame to a similar time frame.

The value shown is the average topmost position for pages from your site. In general, it’s recommended to focus more on trends in impressions and clicks than on position alone.

Find queries or pages with significant change

Sort by the Difference columnto see queries or pages with significant change from a previous period.

Evaluating performance changes

Debugging traffic drops or spikes

A drop in organic Search traffic can happen for several reasons, and most of them can be reversed. To learn more about the main causes for a traffic drop, read Debugging drops in Google Search traffic .

Measuring the impact of page changes

It can be difficult to determine if a specific change you made to a page directly caused an improvement in Search performance. This is because other events, such as periodic changes in user sentiment, news events, or improvements to a competing site, can also contribute to changes in performance.

To measure the impact of a change, confirm whether your improvement in Search maps closely in timing to your site changes, compared to similar time periods in the past (using the comparison feature ). Learn more about Search Console annotations and how they can help you track and understand changes in your data by providing context on your charts.

Compare data from different Google sources

Separate Performance reports are available for traffic originating from Google Search, News, and Discover. Although you can’t combine the data into a single view within Search Console in the browser, you can export the data to compare performance across these different sources.