Fresher query stats

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Query stats in Webmaster Tools provide information about the search queries that most often
return your site in the results. You can view this information by a variety of search types
(such as web search, mobile search, or image search) and countries. We show you the top search
types and locations for your site. You can access these stats by selecting a verified site in
your account and then choosing

Query stats from the Statistics tab.

If you’ve checked your site’s query stats lately, you may have noticed that they’re changing
more often than they used to. This is because we recently changed how frequently we calculate
them. Previously, we showed data that was averaged over a period of three weeks. Now, we show
data that is averaged over a period of one week. This results in fresher stats for you, as well
as stats that more accurately reflect the current queries that return your site in the results.
We update these stats every week, so if you’d like to keep a history of the top queries for your
site week by week, you can simply download the data each week. We generally update this data
each Monday.

How we calculate query stats

Some of you have asked
how we calculate query stats.

These results are based on results that searchers see. For instance, say a search for
“Britney Spears” brings up your site as position 21, which is on the third page of the results.
And say 1000 people searched for [Britney Spears] during the course of a week (in reality, a few
more people than that search for her name, but just go with me for this example). 600 of those
people only looked at the first page of results and the other 400 browsed to at least the third
page. That means that your site was seen by 400 searchers. Even though your site was at position
21 for all 1000 searchers, only 400 are counted for purposes of this calculation.

Both top search queries and top search query clicks are based on the total number of
searches for each query. The stats we show are based on the queries that most often return your
site in the results. For instance, going back to that familiar [Britney Spears] query—400
searchers saw your site in the results. Now, maybe your site isn’t really about Britney Spears
—it’s more about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And say Google received 50 queries for “Buffy the
Vampire Slayer” in the same week, and your site was returned in the results at position 2. So,
all 50 searchers saw your site in the results. In this example, Britney Spears would show as a
top search query above Buffy the Vampire Slayer (because your site was seen by 400 searchers for
Britney but 50 searchers for Buffy).

The same is true of top search query clicks. If 100 of the Britney-seekers clicked on your site
in the search results and all 50 of the Buffy-searchers click on your site in the search
results, Britney would show as a top search query above Buffy.

At times, this may cause some of the query stats we show you to seem unusual. If your site is
returned for a very high-traffic query, then even if a low percentage of searchers click on your
site for that query, the total number of searchers who click on your site may still be
higher for the query than for queries for which a much higher percentage of searchers click on
your site in the results.

The average top position for top search queries is the position of the page on your
site that ranks most highly for the query. The average top position for top search query
clicks is the position of the page on your site that searchers clicked on (even if a different
page ranked more highly for the query). We show you the average position for this top page across
all data centers over the course of the week.

A variety of download options are available. You can:

• download individual tables of data by clicking the Download this table link.
• download stats for all subfolders on your site (for all search types and locations) by clicking
  the Download all query stats for this site (including
  subfolders) link.
• download all stats (including query stats) for all verified sites in your account by choosing
  Tools from the My Sites page, then choosing Download data for all sites and then
  Download statistics for all sites.