What is Impressions vs Clicks?

What each metric actually counts

Impressions depend on the result being seen, so if your listing sits at position 40 the user has to scroll to the fourth page of results before anything registers at all. Nobody scrolls to page four. A page can rank and record almost nothing.

Clicks are simpler. One user, one result, one visit. Repeated clicks by the same person on the same result inside a session get counted once.

Average position is the one people misread. It is an average of averages, weighted by impression, across every query, country and device in your selected range, so a page ranking second in Delhi and thirty first in Mumbai reports a figure in between that describes neither. Filter by query first. The Performance report holds sixteen months, which lets you compare this quarter against the same quarter last year and no further back, so export what matters before it rolls off.

Where teams get this wrong

Reading site level totals as though they describe a single page. Your site total mixes brand queries, which convert at a completely different rate, with everything else, so filter the brand terms out first and what is left is the honest picture of your non brand performance.

Second, treating an impressions rise as progress. A page picking up impressions on queries it has no business ranking for is noise, it drags your site wide click rate down, and the page itself has not improved at all.

Third, ignoring the query dimension. Open Performance, go to the Queries tab, sort by impressions and look at the rows with high impressions and near zero clicks. That list is your rewrite queue.

What this looks like in practice

Take a common pattern, offered as illustration. A multi-outlet restaurant group watches impressions climb steadily for months while clicks stay flat, and the Queries tab explains it in about a minute. The group is surfacing for broad best restaurants type searches at position 20 and beyond, picking up impressions nobody acts on, while its own brand and neighbourhood queries have not moved at all.

The work belongs on pages already ranking in the top ten for something like ‘[neighbourhood] dinner booking’. Smaller impression numbers. Far better clicks.

Where to find this in Google Webmaster Tools

If you learned this tool as Google Webmaster Tools, you are in the right place and the report has simply been renamed. Google rebranded Webmaster Tools to Search Console back in 2015, and a good number of people still search for the old name, so the two words point at the same product.

Sign in, pick your property, then open Performance from the left menu. The four tiles across the top are total clicks, total impressions, average click through rate and average position, and the two you care about here sit side by side. Toggle a tile off to declutter the chart.

Whether you call it impressions vs clicks or clicks vs impressions makes no difference to the data, and nor does writing it in the singular as impression vs click. It is one comparison read from two ends. What matters is the ratio between them, which Search Console already calculates for you as CTR.