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We are using the Search Console (webmaster tools) API to download search performance results for our site to compare search performance on people searching using our company name vs non company name searches. We have found a problem where the impressions don't add up when comparing "all search results" to "search results via specific keywords".

For example, if we do a report to show all web results for all devices for our site on a specific date, we get 189,491 impressions. If we then report to show results with the keyword "Our Name" we get 61,046. If we report on "OurName" (same keyword but without spaces) we get 1,086. If we then report not contains "Our Name" and not contains "OurName" we get 65,827, which adds up to 127,959, meaning somewhere we have 61,532 impressions missing.

Interestingly, if we change the filter on not contains to also include device equals DESKTOP, it increases to 65,997, yet I would have expected this to be equal to or less than all device impressions.

From the data we have this seemed to have stopped working on the 27th November 2015 (before this the 3 figures always added up to the total, on this date and afterwards they don't). The impressions add up fine if we only do one contains and one not contains. Clicks always seem to add up correctly, so I'm wondering if one of these queries is excluding data with zero clicks?

We are using the .Net library to access the Search Console data, but we get the same results when using the API Explorer. It is hard to replicate using the search console, as this doesn't allow you to include multi "not contains" keywords. The total figures and the contains "our name" / "ourname" figures match between the API and the search console.

I've found a few other post on here where people are having similar problems but they are dated over a year ago, and we've only just noticed the problem in the last 3 weeks so I don't know if this is a new problem.

The query for the not contains is as follows:

POST https://www.googleapis.com/webmasters/v3/sites/{YOUR_SITE_URL}/searchAnalytics/query?fields=rows&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

{
 "startDate": "2015-12-07",
 "endDate": "2015-12-07",
 "searchType": "web",
 "dimensionFilterGroups": [
  {
   "filters": [
    {
     "dimension": "query",
     "expression": "our name",
     "operator": "notContains"
    },
    {
     "dimension": "query",
     "expression": "ourname",
     "operator": "notContains"
    }
   ]
  }
 ]
}

Many thanks in advance for any help

cross posted from Google Search Console Forum

Jon Clarke
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2 Answers2

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From the API reference, there is no OR operation available for multiple filter expressions: "Whether all filters in this group must return true ("and"), or one or more must return true (not yet supported)."

BOTH filters must be passed to get into the total. Does not contain "our name" AND Does not contain "ourname". https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/v3/searchanalytics/query

Having said that, you probably are even more at a loss to explain some of your results...maybe you have a number of queries that contain both "our name" AND "ourname"??

Mike Sullivan
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  • the AND operation on multiple filters is how we expected it to work, but thanks for pointing it out. I'll edit the original question to clear up the confusion. We basically want the impressions for all keywords that are not "Our Name" and are not "OurName" – Jon Clarke Dec 18 '15 at 14:23
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I working on the same topic at the moment (excluding brand searches); like Google say, they excluding search queries that can contain privat information:

To protect user privacy, Search Analytics doesn't show all data. For example, we might not track some queries that are made a very small number of times or those that contain personal or sensitive information.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6155685?hl=en#tablegone

With this in mind you have a big block of data with no query information, so if you filter in any way, that whole block isn't included. For example, we had like 325.000 total impressions on the 01.07., but if I do two separate queries one with including and one with excluding and add the values for clicks and impressions together, I get like the total numbers for that block where my queries living in. In our case that is around 180.000 impression, so 145k impressions were made with queries I don't know and can't filter them.

In your case the 127,959 could be your total of impressions (depending of your keywords). So your non brand traffic with 65,827 impressions is more like 50% percent than 30%.

I hope it's more or less understandable.

Felix
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