Measure the impact of your fixes

Tier

Basic or above. Search impact comes with Search Console from Basic up. Free and Hobby show a locked card instead.

Search Console

Connected, with the site's property chosen and the current data-use terms agreed. Results use Web search data only.

Production scans

Fixes are read from scans of your production branch, whether you press Scan now, a schedule runs or your pipeline starts one.

Deploys

Deploy markers and the traffic-drop alert need scans from your CI/CD pipeline, which is included from Basic up.

Not connected yet? Follow Connect Google Search Console first. Everything on this page fills in from the data that connection syncs.

Search impact needs the current consent. If PixyScan's data-use terms for Search Console change, everything on this page pauses for the site, the traffic-drop alert included, until the person who connected it presses Confirm and resume, or another admin reconnects. If the data-use terms change explains it. Nothing is deleted while it waits.

A link on the card opens Search performance, where the full figures are. If the site is not connected, admins see a Connect Search Console card in its place.

On the workspace overview, each connected site's card also shows Clicks (28d) with its change, so you can see which site's traffic moved without opening it.

1. 1

   Open Search performance

   Choose Search performance in the Explore group of the site sidebar. Markers sit on the clicks and impressions trend.

2. 2

   Pick All scans or Deploys only

   The filter above the trend shows every production scan, or only the scans your pipeline started after a deploy.

3. 3

   Open a marker

   It shows the kind of scan, its branch, how the health score changed, and how many issues were fixed and how many are new. For a deploy, View commit opens the commit in your Git host.

Each figure is the page's Web search clicks or impressions over the last 28 days of data. Press a column's heading to sort by it, so the pages with the most traffic come first. A page Google has no data for shows a dash and sorts last.

Pages are matched to Google's data by address. A note above the table says how many were matched, for example Search Console data matched 812 of 940 pages. Small differences such as www, http or a trailing slash still match. Redirects are not followed, so a page Google knows only by an old address is not matched.

On the Pages table, the Bytes column starts hidden when the traffic columns are shown. Turn it back on from the column menu.

After each production scan, PixyScan compares it with the previous full production scan of the same branch. Every check that stopped failing on some pages is a fix, and every check that started failing on some pages is a regression. Each one becomes a row here.

1. 1

   Open the Impact tab

   On Search performance, choose Impact next to Queries and Pages.

2. 2

   Filter the list

   Show all changes, fixes only or regressions only, and pick a status. Press the date or Lift vs rest of site heading to sort. The weekly charts of your health score and clicks sit above the list.

3. 3

   Read a row

   Each row names the check, says whether it was fixed or appeared, and shows the date, how many of its pages have Search Console data, its status, and clicks before and after.

4. 4

   Open a row for the page breakdown

   It lists the changed pages with their clicks and impressions before and after, the pages with the most clicks first.

PixyScan compares clicks to the changed pages before and after, and does the same for the rest of the site over the same days. The result says how much better or worse the changed pages did than the rest of the site. It reads, for example: After this change, these pages did 15% better than the rest of the site.

Comparing with the rest of the site takes out what happened everywhere at once, such as a season or a Google update. If the changed pages lost 10% of their clicks while the rest of the site lost 30%, the changed pages did 29% better.

The windows are the same on every tier. Until the after window is complete, before and after figures are shown per day so they compare like with like. Once a result is Ready, it does not change.

The weekly charts let you look at the two lines side by side. They do not work out how one affects the other, and they need at least two weeks that have both a score and clicks.

It compares clicks in the 3 days after the deploy with the same 3 days of the week over the previous 4 weeks. It alerts only when all three of these are true:

Google's newest days are provisional for two to three days, so the alert is decided about a week after the deploy (day 6 at the earliest). Several deploys on the same day share one check, and each deploy day alerts at most once.

The alert appears in the bell and on Site alerts, and opens Search performance at the deploy's marker. It is also emailed to the site's members and workspace admins, and sent to the Slack and generic webhooks when they are set. The message reads, for example: Clicks fell 32% in the 3 days after deploy a1b2c3d (branch main), compared with the same days of the previous 4 weeks.

If the site's Search Console data is later deleted, for example because Search Console was disconnected, alerts already sent stay in Site alerts but lose their click figures. Emails, Slack messages and webhook calls already delivered are not changed.