What your website numbers actually mean
Impressions are the times your site appeared in a Google result. Clicks are the times somebody chose it. Visits are the people who arrived, from anywhere. Views are the pages those people opened. Each counts something different, which is why two reports about the same site can disagree and both be right.
Somebody sends you a figure and you have no way of knowing whether it is good.
Four hundred views. Twelve clicks. Ninety visitors. The words sound interchangeable and they are not.
Each one counts something different.
What impressions, clicks, visits and views mean
Impressions. How often your site appeared in search results. Appearing is not the same as being noticed, and it is not the same as being read.
Clicks. How many people picked you out of those results and came over.
Visits. How many separate times somebody arrived at your site. Also called sessions. The same person coming back on Thursday is a second visit.
Views. How many pages got opened. Also called pageviews. One visit can easily be five views.
One person, one search, one afternoon, looks like this: one impression, one click, one visit and four views. The same person, four different numbers, all of them correct.
Why no two tools ever agree
Ask three tools how many people visited your site last month and you will get three answers, and they can be a long way apart.
They filter out automated traffic differently. They disagree about when one visit ends and the next begins. Some are blocked by browsers and phones, so they undercount and never know it.
None of them is lying. The rule to take from it is simple: compare a tool against itself over months, never one tool against another.
Is your number any good?
For a local trade or a small service business, a few hundred visits a month is normal, and a good few sit well below that. If somebody has told you that figure is embarrassing, they are selling something.
The count on its own means nothing without the second half of the sentence. Twenty visits that produce two phone calls beats a thousand that produce silence.
The businesses that get disappointed by their numbers are usually the ones nobody ever explained this to.
The number almost nobody tracks
Enquiries, rather than visits: messages through the form, taps on your phone number, taps on your email address. That is the only figure that answers the question you have, which is whether the site is bringing you work.
Most websites cannot tell you whether the call button has ever been pressed, because nobody set it up to count. It is a small job and it changes the whole conversation about whether the site is worth having.
One caveat, and we hold ourselves to it: a tap is not a call. Somebody can press the number and change their mind. A tap figure is a strong signal, not a receipt, and anyone reporting it to you should say so.
Worth watching each month
- Enquiries, split by how they arrived
- Visits, judged over three months rather than week to week
- Impressions and clicks, which tell you whether Google is showing you to more people or fewer
- Which pages people land on, which is often not the homepage and is usually a surprise
Not worth watching
Day to day movement. A quiet Tuesday means a quiet Tuesday.
Bounce rate. It counts people who looked at one page and left, which sounds bad and frequently is not. Somebody who lands on your contact page, reads your phone number and rings you is recorded as a bounce. That is a win filed as a failure.
Time on page. A visitor who found your opening hours in nine seconds had a better experience than one who hunted for four minutes.
Traffic from social, if you do not post on social. It will be near zero and it is meant to be.
Two traps worth knowing
A missing day is not a zero day. If a tool was down, or was only switched on in March, the gap in the chart is a gap. Anyone drawing it as a zero, or comparing this month against a month that was never recorded, is showing you a made up number.
Percentages hide small numbers. Going from two visits to six is a two hundred percent rise. It is also four visits. Ask for the count beside any percentage.
Where to find yours
Google Search Console is free and it is where impressions and clicks live. Set it up once, on your own account, and nobody can take it off you.
Visits and views come from whatever analytics your site runs. If you do not know whether yours has any, that is worth finding out before you next get sent a figure.
Or read it in an email instead
Every site we look after gets a monthly report: visitors, enquiries, how you showed up on Google, and what we would do about it. Written in the language above, with the gaps shown as gaps.
No dashboard and no login.
See what is in the report · Get a free quote
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