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As you can see in the screenshot below, there has been >400 impressions and 97 clicks, but at the bottom of the table it shows only two queries that led to the clicks.

The question is: where is the other search queries that have produced the impressions and clicks?

webmasters screenshot

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  • Dang good question! I checked my WMT accounts and the query count is greater (just slightly) than the click count and all queries are listed. In your case, just 4 searches are listed with 97 clicks. Is this a new site or new GWT account? That may be the issue. It may take 30+ days to fill in the data. Still, you would think the data should make sense.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Sep 13, 2014 at 3:17
  • Thanks for your quick answer. The site is around 2months old now, and the webmasters account is exactly around 30 days old. So the questions is: should I wait it out or is there something wrong in set up that I should change?
    – Domas
    Commented Sep 13, 2014 at 7:41
  • It has been a while since I signed up a new site, but I seem to remember for the first month or so my data was a bit wonky too. I would give it a while longer. Perhaps another 30 days.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Sep 13, 2014 at 14:39
  • 1
    It needs more datapoints, more impressions & clicks.
    – John Mueller
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 23:48
  • @closetnoc I have the same problem for all of my websites which some of them are about 3 years old. The difference in the numbers reported for my sites are also extremely huge and I can't understand why this happens.
    – Aliweb
    Commented Nov 22, 2014 at 13:06

1 Answer 1

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If you're looking for complete Apache referer_log analysis, you will have to use your tools rather than what Google provides you. I think they are trying to provide you a distilled version of referrals which will provide a good but incomplete picture.

The answer to your question is in a blog post from Google:

The relevant passage is:

we're showing a "Displaying" number for Impressions and Clicks. This number represents a total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table. The number in bold appearing just above it is a total count of all queries including the "long tail" of queries which are not displayed in the Search Queries table. When the "Displaying" number is not visible, such as when you select a specific country from the "All countries" drop-down menu, then the bold number is the total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table.

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  • Just a note: Be careful with Apache referrer_log too, it can be sorta inaccurate. It's popular for spammers to let their bots hit for 404's then use a spoofed referrer so that they get free advertise on platforms that share logs publicly. I assume they can do the same with search terms for a similar purpose.
    – dhaupin
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 14:59
  • Sure, I've across that with log analysis. It is just part of the "noise" filtering we have to do as webmasters.
    – Sun
    Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 16:50

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