It’s time to measure the impact of the markup. Match your SEO success to your schema markup efforts using the Schema Markup Trend Report together with Google Analytics. Set up an “Enhanced Analytics – Core” report to understand your visitor behaviour in more depth.
Use the Schema Markup Trend report to track your schema markup journey. Match your efforts against the results you capture in Google Search Console.
Getting Started
- Set your URL home page (if not already set up)
- Log into Schema App and choose “Trend Report” from the left navigation bar.
- Set up your preferences by clicking on “Crawl Settings”
NOTE: After set up, it takes about half an hour for Schema App to schedule the crawl. Every 500 pages will take approximately 1 hour to crawl.
Google Search Console
Compare site-wide performance to performance of pages that contain rich results and learn how to measure results using:
- Query Filter
- Rich Results Filter
- Page Filter
- Date Filter
Getting Started
When you first log into Search Console, it will open with an Overview page, as shown below.
To look at the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), click on “Open Report”. You can also access this information by choosing Performance from the sidebar on the left.
The report captures site performance for organic traffic and includes:
- Total clicks
- Total impressions
- Average click-through rate
- Average position
Click any of the options to add or remove them from the graph.
For a cleaner result, we recommend starting with only “Total Clicks” and “Total Impressions”.
Capture your Starting Point
ACTION: If you haven’t already done so, we recommend benchmarking your site’s current performance before you’ve implemented schema markup so that you have a starting reference point. Many of our customers capture:
- Search rank position
- Traffic
- Clickthrough rate %
- Bounce rate
- Time on Page
- Search Features, e.g. rich snippets, answer box, knowledge graph, etc.
Slicing and Dicing the Data
Option 1: Date Filter
Segment the data by specifying a time period. To view a complete month, select the “Custom” field.
Option 2: Time Period Comparison
Google Search Console has some predefined comparison periods. Look under the “Compare” tab (within the “Date Range” selection tool).
Be cognizant of trends that may occur on certain days, such as increased site traffic on a Saturday, Sunday or holiday. If this pertains to your business, manually select a start and end date to align with a day of the week (e.g. Saturday or Monday). Be sure to adjust your start date to account for this even when you are comparing year over year data.
Google Search Console provides 16-months of data, which means there is always a three-month overlap with the previous year – allowing you to measure year-over-year progress.
We recommend calculating the change in growth rate by determining the difference between the average growth (month-over-month) before and after schema markup.
Be sure to use the same number of months before and after for an accurate representation of this change.
Option 3: Compare a Page set of URLs
If you inventory your page sets, noting which ones have schema markup (and when it was added) and which ones don’t, you can compare one page set to another by using a list of URLs.
To access the “Page” filter, click the “+ New” button.
Option 4: Measure by Page Type
You can measure the impact of schema markup for a particular page type. For example, if I wanted to measure ‘blog postings’, I could use the ‘Page’ filter to include only those pages that contain ‘/blog/’ in their URL.
Option 5: Compare pages with rich results to those with no rich results
If a page is eligible for rich results, use the “Search Appearance” filter to display only the performance of the rich result pages.
Example: Compare the ‘rich results’ click-through rates to the click-through rate of the site as a whole. We can assume that if the rich results have a higher click-through rate, then they are outperforming the other pages and skewing the sitewide click-through rate up.
The first chart shows the performance with rich results, while the bottom chart shows the performance of the entire site.
In this example, the rich results have a higher click-through rate and achieve a better average rank position than the other results.
If the pages weren’t previously receiving rich results you will likely see a steep increase from zero. Rich result page performance can be compared to other page performance to view the impact.
We recommend:
- Calculating the percent of impressions or clicks that your rich result segment are achieving compared to the sitewide performance.
- Calculating the growth of rich results as a percentage of total growth by determining the difference between two time periods for both rich results and sitewide and then calculating the rich results difference as a percentage of the sitewide difference.
Option 6: Use the “Query” filter to compare and contrast results
The “Query” filter allows you to filter out queries containing (or not containing) any given keyword. Using this functionality, you can differentiate “branded” versus “non-branded” content. But note that this can be tricky.
For example, if Schema App wanted to filter using, “Queries not containing” > “Schema”, we would inadvertently omit valid non-branded queries that are about schema markup and not Schema App specifically. Therefore, filtering out “Schema App” would likely be the best approach to see only non-branded site performance.
Option 7: Combine “Query” and “Page” filters
Blog posts can be key drivers of traffic and can typically be compared using non-branded queries when compared to other site pages. To capture the metrics, combine a “Query” filter and a “Page” type filter to see how the non-branded traffic has changed over time, as shown below.
Hey, wait! My results are going down!
Implementing FAQ schema markup can impact your traffic. Read article
Zero Click Search results impact stats. Read article
Misattributed Errors
Sometimes errors show up in Google’s Search Console that aren’t showing up in Google’s Structured Data Testing tool. When this happens it is difficult to know which tool is providing you with accurate information. Our team has uncovered some misattributed errors in the Search Console. If you are running into a similar issue, check out our blog, “How To Resolve Misattributed Errors In The New Google Search Console” for a complete walk-through.
Disclaimer: For the most current information, we recommend that you reference Google's search console training.
Enhanced Analytics - Core
Now you can better understand your visitor behaviour, by pulling any of the schema.org properties you’ve marked up, into your Google Analytics.
Google Analytics allows you to track and report website traffic at the URL level. Schema App’s Enhanced Analytics reports allow you to dive deeper and learn about your traffic at a more granular level. Imagine being able to understand which elements on a page are generating the most interest! By adding your schema entities into Google Analytics, you can get more information out of your site and understand your visitor behaviour in greater depth. The opportunities are endless!
To learn how to set up your report click here.
Click here to view our FAQ on enhanced analytics!
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