One SEO professional asked John Mueller during the submitted Question and Answer segment of his hangout about why numbers don’t add up properly in Google Search Console.
The SEO pro mentioned that they click on a page that has 241 clicks, they click on the queries report, and the queries add up to 148, rather than 241.
Should they be attributing this to the anonymized queries that are mentioned in the Google Search Console Help Center?
John explained that yes, this is usually the case. In particular, when you look at the page level, Google shows you all of the information in Search Console. And this is because there’s nothing unique about the individual page requests.
But, when it comes to queries, there are queries that have only very limited use. And they would not necessarily show these in Search Console. This means that when you look at the report, you will see on the one hand, the number on top of the report that says total impressions, or total clicks, and you can look at the individual impression and clicks for each individual query.
Sometimes, when you add up the table, it doesn’t match. This is due to Google dropping the queries that are anonymized queries. And this is the difference that you would see there.
In Search Console, if you look at it on a page level, you will see different numbers than on a per-query level.
On a query level, when you look at the table itself, you might see slightly different numbers than the summary on top.
From Google’s perspective, if you want to look at the individual queries, the query level data is definitely useful.
But, if you want to see the full picture of the impressions to the site, then you want to look at the page level or site level results and use that for tracking trends and changes over time.
This happens at approximately the 29:49 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 29:49
In Search Console, when looking at the pages report, I click on one page that has 241 clicks, I click on the queries report, and queries add up to 148. Do we attribute this to the anonymized queries mentioned in the Help Center?
John (Answer) 30:07
Yes, usually that’s the case. So in particular, when you look at the page level, we can show you all of the information in Search Console. And that is because there’s nothing kind of unique about the individual page requests. But when it comes to queries, there are queries that have only very limited use. And we would not show those necessarily in Search Console.
That means when you look at the report, and you’ll see on the one hand, the number on top of the report where it says like total impressions, or total, total clicks, and you can look at the individual impressions and clicks for each individual query, and sometimes when you add up the table, it doesn’t match up.
And that’s essentially due to us dropping those queries that are kind of anonymized queries. And that’s kind of the differences that you would see there. So in Search Console, if you look at it on a page level, you’ll see different, slightly different numbers than on a per-query level. And on a query level, when you look at the table itself, you might see slightly different numbers than the summary on top.
And from our point of view, if you want to look at the individual queries, the query level data is definitely useful. But if you want to see the full picture of the impressions to the site, then you kind of want to look at the page level or the site level results and use that for tracking the trends and kind of changes over time.
