Mediaboss Marketing

Today, Google has expanded the historical search query data to 90 days. The number of queries reported has increased as well: the report will now list the top 2,000 for each day of the selected date range (vs. the previous top 1,000). This is great news, as this is data not available anywhere else and when looking at trends, the more information, the better. Google has made a few other minor adjustments to this data recently. So if you use Google webmaster tools query data, see below for all the details of how these reports work.

First, a refresher on what this data is all about. The top search queries report (available in Google webmaster tools for sites youve verified ownership of by selecting Your site on the web > Search queries) lists the top queries that brought traffic to your site from Google organic search (from all countries and properties).

For the selected data range, the report shows the total number of queries that brought traffic to the site, the total impressions and clicks the site received, and the number of impressions and clicks for the reported top queries.

For each query, the report notes:

You can click into any query to get more specific data, including the pages that ranked for the query, and the impressions, clicks, and click-through rate at each position the site ranked.

Use the filters to drill into what queries brought traffic from Google properties (web, video, images, mobile web, and smartphones) and from specific countries.

As I explained in a previous post, the numbers can be tricky and its important to understand what data youre really looking at. These reports now list the top 2,000 queries that brought traffic to the site for the selected time period. That means that if a query wasnt one of the top 2,000 for any days in the selected range, data wont be reported for it. In the example below, the time period is 30 days, but only 6 of those days have data reported for the query (as illustrated by the dots in the graph).

When generating or downloading the data, keep in mind the following:

Its great that Google is offering more data (both number of queries and length of time). Just be sure that as you use this data, you understand exactly what youre looking at and comparing (both in terms of data range and date reported per day).

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Google Webmaster Tools Expands Query Data to 90 Days