The Statistics Behind Google's Search Click Metric
by Daniel James StokerLast Updated on October 22, 2024
What is Google’s Search Click Metric?
Google's search click metric tracks when a user searches for a query and clicks on a website or webpage listed on a Google search engine results page (SERP), directing the user to that site. In Google Search Console and Google Ads, Google distinguishes between clicks from organic search results and those from paid search results. Google also monitors the number of clicks a website or webpage receives over time and across various queries. Only clicks that lead users away from the Google search results page are counted. Clicks that keep the user within the Google platform do not count as clicks to the website or webpage.
Google search clicks are one of the four traditional search metrics, along with the Google search impression metric, Google search CTR (click-through rate) metric, and Google search average position metric. It is also one of the two summation metrics, alongside the search impression metric, that accumulate and reports the total number of occurrences. In contrast, the search CTR metric represents the ratio of clicks to impressions, and the search average position metric reflects the average of search positions.
Google Search Click Search Environments
Examples of search results that a user can click on, which will take them outside of the Google platform and result in a search click being counted by Google, include:
Organic Search Results: Clicking on standard blue links that appear naturally based on Google's ranking algorithm.
Paid Search Results (Pay-Per-Click Ads): Clicking on sponsored links that appear at the top or bottom of the search results page.
Google Discover: Clicking on articles and content recommendations that appear in the Google Discover feed.
Google News: Clicking on news articles aggregated by Google News.
Featured Snippets: Clicking on links within the featured snippet box that provides a direct answer to a query.
Image Search Results: Clicking on images that lead to the original source website.
Video Search Results: Clicking on video links that lead to platforms like YouTube or other websites hosting the video.
Google Shopping: Clicking on product listings that direct users to the retailer's site.
Local Pack/Google Maps: Clicking on links within the local business listings or map results.
Knowledge Panels: Clicking on certain links within knowledge panels that lead to external sites.
AI Overviews: Clicking on links provided within AI-generated answers or overviews.
Job Listings: Clicking on job postings that lead to the original job board or company website.
Google Search Click Analytics Platforms
Google’s search click metric is one of four foundational metrics that is available to view and filter on in the following Google platforms:
Google Search Console: This tool provides summarized reports on how your website performs in Google Search, including clicks, impressions, click-through rates (CTR), and average position.
Google Analytics: While not providing search-specific click metrics directly, it offers extensive data on user behavior, including clicks on various elements within your site.
Google Ads (formerly AdWords): This platform provides detailed metrics on ad performance, including ad clicks, ad impressions, ad CTR, and cost-per-click (CPC).
Google BigQuery: With the integration of Search Console data, you can analyze click metrics on a larger, and more granular, scale and perform more complex queries and data analyses.
Google Looker Studio: By connecting with Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google Ads, this tool allows you to create detailed reports and visualizations that include click metrics.
How Google Calculates Search Clicks
Any click that directs a user to a page outside of Google’s platform is typically counted as a Google search click and recorded in tools like Google Search Console and Google BigQuery. If a user clicks on a result, is taken to a webpage outside Google, and then returns to the Google search results to click on the same webpage again, it will still be counted as only one click. While this is the foundational method for Google to calculate click data, some Google platforms and tools have evolved with various customizations and needs for tracking clicks. Here are ways that click data can be collected and counted differently across Google:
Google Search Console Clicks:
Search Results: A click is counted when a user clicks on a search result leading to your website. This includes clicks on organic results, rich results, and featured snippets.
Different Search Elements: For elements like video results, image results, or news results, clicks might be counted when users click to view more information or navigate to the content source.
Google Analytics Clicks:
Page Clicks: Clicks are counted when users interact with links or buttons on your website. This is tracked through events and goals you set up in Analytics.
Outbound Clicks: If you track outbound links, these clicks are recorded when users click links that take them to external sites.
Enhanced E-commerce: For e-commerce sites, clicks on product links, add-to-cart buttons, and other shopping-related elements are tracked differently.
Google Ads Clicks:
Ad Clicks: A click is counted when a user clicks on your ad, leading to a landing page or another designated destination. This includes clicks on text ads, display ads, shopping ads, and video ads.
Engagement Clicks: For video ads, an engagement click might be counted when a user interacts with the ad in specific ways, such as clicking to play a video.
Google BigQuery Clicks:
Custom Click Metrics: When integrating with BigQuery, you can define custom queries to count clicks based on specific criteria or interactions relevant to your data needs.
Aggregated Data: Click data from various sources (like Search Console or Analytics) can be aggregated and analyzed, potentially leading to different interpretations of what constitutes a click depending on the source data.
Google Looker Studio Clicks:
Data Source Dependent: Click metrics in Data Studio depend on the connected data sources (e.g., Google Analytics, Google Ads). The way clicks are counted will reflect the definitions and tracking methods of those sources.
Visualization: The representation of clicks can vary based on how you choose to visualize and filter the data in your reports.
What is Google’s Search Click Metric in Google Search Console?
Google presents the click metric in Google Search Console as 'Total clicks' for a website property. By default, this is viewed as the total clicks for the entire website, showing the cumulative clicks for all pages and all queries over a given period.
The 'Total clicks' metric can be filtered to show total clicks for just a single page, a single query, or a combination of a single page and single query. The dashboard also allows for custom expressions to identify subsets of traffic related to pages or queries with specific text patterns (e.g., searching for all pages with 'product' in the URL or all queries with 'near me').
How Google Search Console Filters for Search Click Data
The four types of Google’s search click metric that can be filtered and viewed in Google Search Console are:
- Site Clicks: total clicks for all pages and queries driving traffic to the website.
- Page Clicks: total clicks for a single page and all queries driving traffic to this single page.
- Query Clicks: total clicks for a single query and all pages this single query is driving traffic to.
- Query Page Clicks (QPCs): total clicks for a single page and a single query driving traffic to this single page.
Google Search Site Clicks
Google search Site Clicks represent the total clicks for all pages and all queries driving traffic to a website, reflecting a many-to-many relationship between pages and queries. While SEOs and businesses traditionally view increases in Site Clicks as a positive indicator of performance, there are a complex set of statistical factors that can influence Site Clicks.
Google search Site Clicks represent the total clicks for all pages and all queries driving traffic to a website, reflecting a many-to-many relationship between pages and queries. While SEOs and businesses traditionally view increases in Site Clicks as a positive indicator of performance, a complex set of statistical factors can influence Site Clicks.
For example, consider a website with just three webpages. In a 30-day pre-period, each of these pages received a total of 30 clicks, equally distributed from three queries. For now, we'll assume that all pages and queries have the same business value for driving traffic to the website, beyond their quantitative contributions.
Even in this simple scenario, a significant shift in clicks—where every query drives half of its previous click volume except for one query, which now drives five times the number of clicks (as shown in Table 2 below)—results in the total Site Clicks still remaining at 90. This occurs despite a negative shift in traffic for about 89% of the underlying queries contributing to Site Clicks.
This highlights the statistical limitations of relying solely on Site Clicks as a measure of the quantitative health of search traffic from all the underlying queries driving traffic to the website's pages.
This statistical limitation is further emphasized in a scenario where the first page loses all its search traffic, the second page retains the same search traffic, and the third page doubles its search traffic. Despite these diverse fluctuations in search traffic across the site's pages, the total Site Clicks remains unchanged at 90 clicks.
While these are very simplified examples involving just three webpages for a website, we can already see the complex nature of changes in traffic to these pages and their underlying queries. Most sites, however, have hundreds to thousands of pages receiving traffic from typically thousands of underlying queries. The scenarios and complexity for an average site are even greater.
Google Search Page Clicks
Google search Page Clicks represent the total clicks from all queries driving traffic to a single webpage, reflecting a one-to-many relationship between a page and its queries. While SEOs and businesses traditionally view increases in Page Clicks as a positive indicator of performance, a complex set of statistical factors can influence Page Clicks.
Returning to our previous example, let's filter this down to a single page receiving traffic from three queries, each contributing an equal amount of traffic.
Later, we check on this page and its three queries and find that the first two queries have half the search traffic they previously had, while the third query has doubled in traffic. Despite the majority of queries driving traffic to this page experiencing a loss in search traffic, the Page Clicks remain the same at 30.
At a later time, we check on the page and find that the first query is no longer driving traffic to the page, the second query has returned to its original traffic volume, and the third query has doubled its original traffic volume. Despite these changes, the Page Clicks are still 30.
Looking beyond scenarios where the Page Clicks remain constant, we see two instances where Page Clicks increased from 30 to 40. In the first case, two of the queries doubled their traffic while the third lost all traffic. In the second case, two of the queries lost all their traffic while the third quadrupled its traffic.
While Page Clicks have improved in both cases, one scenario represents an increase in search traffic for the majority of queries, while the other scenario represents a decrease in search traffic for the majority of queries.
We had assumed that all queries carry the same value in search traffic, so in these cases, an increase in Page Clicks would be viewed as positive. However, if the business had goals around achieving diversity in queries or if a specific query was of higher value, some of these changes may be seen by the business as negative. This highlights the statistical limitation of relying solely on Page Clicks as a performance indicator, unless all underlying traffic is studied alongside qualitative descriptors of value.
Google Search Query Clicks
Google search Query Clicks are the total clicks for a single query driving traffic to multiple webpages, reflecting a one-to-many relationship between a query and pages. While it is also traditional for SEOs and businesses to regard increases in Query Clicks as positive for performance, there is a complex set of statistical factors that can affect Query Clicks.
We’ll return to our previous example but will consider a single query over a period of 30 days where the query drives traffic to multiple webpages. Each page receives 10 clicks in this pre-period. We’ll assume for now that all pages hold the same business value for collecting traffic from this query, beyond their quantitative contributions.
We again find that there can be a loss of all traffic, no change in traffic, or a large increase in traffic, but this time coming from one query to multiple pages. Despite these variations, the Query Clicks remain the same as in the previous period.
We can essentially experience the same statistical scenarios as with Page Clicks. If we assume equal value to the business between all the pages collecting traffic from this query, then we might identify increases in Query Clicks as always being positive. However, that is usually not the case. Typically, the business will assign different values to the pages. In the case of the same query, there may even be query cannibalization occurring, where only one of the pages is the preferred page to receive traffic from the query of interest.
Google Search Query Page Clicks
Google search Query Page Clicks are the total clicks for a single query driving traffic to a single webpage, reflecting a one-to-one relationship between a query and page.
The Query Page Clicks metric is the only click metric that provides a granular level of search traffic, ensuring that any changes are truly reflective of performance changes. By focusing on this metric, we can avoid statistical situations where multiple changes in traffic for multiple pages or queries result in a loss of information about how these detailed traffic patterns are evolving.
Summary
Google's search click metric is crucial for understanding web traffic and is one of the four traditional search metrics, alongside impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position. While it can be tracked in various environments such as organic results, paid ads, Google Discover, Google News, and more, it is important to understand the complexity and statistical limitations of using search clicks as a sole performance indicator.
Underlying changes in multiple pages and multiple queries can result in aggregated click metrics where important performance information is lost. This can be particularly significant when the value of the pages and queries themselves varies. For instance, a 50% increase in clicks for one query alongside a 50% decrease in clicks for another query may not be seen as a nullifying net performance change if the value to the business of the former query is greater than the latter, or vice versa.
It's important to understand these limitations of the click metric. If there are qualitative differentiators between pages and queries, then using Query Page Clicks is essential and critical for tracking, understanding, and reporting on the performance health and traffic of a website.
About the Author: Daniel James Stoker is a member of the FindLaw Performance Team and holds degrees of B.S. in Physics, B.S.H.S. in Physiological Sciences, a M.S. in Computer Sciences Database Technologies, and has completed a PGP in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Business Applications.