Almost Half of GSC Clicks Go to Hidden Terms

Most SEOs consider Google Search Console (GSC) their source of truth and trust the data to be accurate. What if I told you that GSC doesn’t tell you all of the keywords you’re getting traffic from? In fact, the tool doesn’t show a term for nearly half the clicks. These instances of hidden terms account for 46.08% of all clicks in our study. The study includes one month of data across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 Almost Half billion total clicks. Let’s dive in. Breakdown of the data First, I want to give a big thanks to Mauricio Fernandez from our backend team for helping me pull this data.

Missing is calculated

As follows: (total clicks – sum of clicks to all keywords) / total clicks This is a scatter plot where each dot represents one of the 146,741 websites. It shows the percentage executive email list of clicks that is missing and the overall site traffic. As you can see, some sites have no terms with clicks associated and others have all of their data. Every site is different, and the amount of missing data varies across the dataset. There are a couple of points here I want to talk about because of their significance. There’s a site (1) with 100 million clicks where 90.3% of the data is missing. There’s another site (2) with 63 million clicks that are missing terms for only 2.27% of their clicks.

Almost Half can see

The data varies a lot! Another way to show how much the missing click data varies is to look at the distribution of how much data is missing across the dataset. There are Phone Number List lots of sites in every single bucket. You’ll have a tough time guessing how much data is missing from any one site. You see lots of sites around the middle and a large spike at 95%-100% missing clicks. So many of the sites are missing about half their data, but a large number of sites are missing most of the data. What I think may be interesting is to bucket the sites by the traffic they receive. 

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