Google Webmaster Tools gets more transparent, now shows impressions and clicks by res

[admin]

In case you didn't catch it, Google Webmaster Tools recently deployed a VERY useful new feature. You can now break your sites search traffic down by the query keywords and also your position in the results. These new stats show how many times you appeared in the results for a given search (impressions) and also how you performed (clicks and CTR). The data also breaks down which pages the users were sent to on your site.
You wouldn't have to be Einstein to know Google is definitely using this information to adjust search result rankings. It's bringing more of an adwords style performance metric into the search algorithm. If people love clicking your link, then it's probably a good result for that search. This type of adjustment obviously helps to weed out crap results, but if it's a well formed result listing to a bad site it may not matter too much (Note: that's likely where Chrome and/or Google Analytics usage data are integrated)

Below shows how the Datalicious web site is performing for the search term "osama bin laden" (Note: We were surprised to see we somehow get traffic off this term too!). For a given query you can see the traffic, and the click through rates for each position. This is not a fantastic example as the click through is too low to compare, but for high traffic terms you will notice wild variations in the click through percentage of each position in the search results.*




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