Reading the Traffic dashboard.
28 days of real Google Search Console data, compared with the 28 before it. The four KPIs, the position bands, and the one metric where a falling number is good news.
The Traffic tab is the only place in ScoutRival that reports what actually happened — real people, searching, clicking or not clicking. Everything else measures your site. This measures your customers. It comes straight from Google Search Console, so it shows nothing until you connect it.
The window: 28 days, ending 3 days ago
Every number on this tab covers 28 days, ending 3 days before today — and is compared against the 28 days immediately before that. The header line spells out both dates so you're never guessing.
The three-day lag is deliberate, and it is not us being slow. Google finalises Search Console data late. Yesterday's numbers are provisional and will still move; pulling them would mean showing you a dip that isn't real. We wait until the data has settled and then report it.
If you published something on Monday, you will not see it here on Tuesday. Give it three days before you draw any conclusion — the window has to move past it first.
The four numbers
Four cards across the top, each with the current 28 days and a delta against the previous 28.
| Metric | What it means | Up is… |
|---|---|---|
| Total clicks | How many people actually came to your site from Google. | Good |
| Total impressions | How many times you appeared in someone's results, clicked or not. | Good |
| Average CTR | Clicks divided by impressions. Shown as a percentage; the delta is in percentage points. | Good |
| Average position | Your mean rank across every query you appeared for. 1 is the top of page one. | Bad |
Average position is the one that trips people up. A lower number is better — position 4.2 beats position 9.8. We handle that for you: when average position falls, the delta chip goes green and points up, because the thing that happened is good. Read the colour, not the arithmetic.
Reading clicks against impressions
The interesting story is usually in the gap between the two:
- Impressions up, clicks flat. You're being shown more but chosen less. That's a snippet problem, not a ranking problem — your title and description aren't earning the click. Go to the SERP preview and look at what Google is actually printing.
- Impressions down, position up. You're ranking better on fewer queries — often the sign of a site that got more focused. Not necessarily bad.
- Everything flat. 28 days is a short window for search. One quiet month is noise; three are a trend.
Where your rankings sit
The Keyword position distribution donut splits every query you ranked for in the window into five bands. The number in the middle is how many ranking keywords you have in total.
| Band | What it means in practice | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Top 3 | The only positions that reliably get clicked. | 1–3 |
| 4–10 | Page one. Visible, but the click rate drops away fast. | 4–10 |
| 11–20 | Page two. Close enough to be worth pushing — this is where effort pays best. | 11–20 |
| 21–50 | You exist. Nobody is finding you this way. | 21–50 |
| 50+ | Indexed, and that's about all you can say. | 51+ |
Above the donut, three headline shares: Premium (1–3), First page (1–10) and Page 2 (11–20). Page 2 is the number to watch — those are the keywords one good article away from earning actual traffic.
These bands are exactly what the Search visibility pillar of your SEO score is built from — the share of your tracked queries that rank in the top 10, with half credit for 11–50. That pillar is worth 15% of your score, and it is switched off entirely until Search Console is connected. How the score works →
Queries, pages and countries
Three tables, each showing the top ten rows with clicks, impressions, CTR and average position:
- Top queries — the actual words people typed. This is the most useful table on the page, and the fastest route to a content idea: find a query you rank 11–20 for and write the piece that deserves position 3.
- Top pages — which of your URLs earn the traffic. Shown as paths, not full URLs, so the table stays readable.
- Countries — where the searches came from, as country codes.
Google does not hand over every query — it withholds rare and personally-identifying ones. So the totals in the four KPI cards will always be a little higher than the sum of the rows in the table. That gap is Google's, not a bug.
How fresh the data is
We cache your Search Console bundle for about six hours, per brand and per property. Reloading the page more often than that will not produce new numbers, because there are no new numbers — Search Console has no realtime data. The cache also clears itself each time a new day of data finalises.
If the tab shows the connection card but no dashboard, the pull failed or there's genuinely nothing in the window yet. A brand-new property can take a few days to report anything at all.
Switching property, and disconnecting
Once connected, the card at the top shows the Google account you linked and a dropdown of every property that account can see.
- Switching property re-points this brand at a different site in the same Google account and reloads the dashboard. Useful when you have both a
https://property and a domain property and picked the thin one by mistake. - Disconnect removes the link for this brand. It asks first. It does not touch anything inside Search Console — it only forgets the connection at our end, and your Search-visibility pillar switches off until you reconnect.
The connection is per brand. Connecting Search Console for one brand does not connect it for the others.