Search query analytics

Query analytics is the layer that explains a traffic change instead of merely showing it. The data appears in two places — Search query statistics for the site’s standing by query, and Page statistics for how individual URLs perform — and both are built on the same five metrics.

The metrics, defined precisely

• Impressions — the link shown in results for a query. Yandex’s definition contains an important exclusion: presence on the second or later results page does not count as an impression unless the user actually opened that page.
• Clicks — clicks on the site from the results page.
• CTR — clicks divided by impressions, which Yandex describes as a measure of how attractive the snippet is.
• Average position — averaged across the day, because a site occupies different positions for the same query at different times.
• Average click position — the position the site occupied at the moment users actually clicked, which is frequently better than the plain average.

Up to six metrics can appear in one report; increases are shown in green and decreases in red, always compared with the preceding period.

Why the numbers disagree with other Yandex tools

This is the section worth reading before anyone builds a report. Compared with Wordstat, the console counts impressions and clicks only up to position 50 — so it sees a slice, not the market — and Wordstat data can lag by up to a month. Compared with Metrica, the console counts clicks from search results while Metrica counts sessions, and the two diverge whenever the site was unavailable at click time, the tag is missing or misinstalled on the landing page, the browser did not load the tag in time, or the HTTP Referer header was unavailable. Click-time boundaries and time zones account for the rest.

The decomposition that matters

Every drop in clicks is one of three things: fewer impressions (demand or eligibility changed), a worse position (ranking changed), or a lower CTR (the snippet or the competition changed). The remedies have nothing in common, so the first analytical step is always to separate them — a decline in clicks with position and impressions steady is a snippet problem and no amount of technical work will fix it.