Starting today, we’re updating our Top Search Queries feature to make it better match expectations about search engine rankings. Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.

An example
Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.

We anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported.

How will this affect my Top Search Queries data?
This change will affect your Top Search Queries data going forward. Historical data will not change. Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, as we will no longer be averaging in lower-ranking URLs.

Check out the updated Top Search Queries data in the Your site on the web section of Webmaster Tools. And remember, you can also download Top Search Queries data programmatically!

We look forward to providing you a more representative picture of your Google Search data. Let us know what you think in our Webmaster Forum.

Posted by Chris Anderson, Google Analytics team, and Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Speed is an important part of the users experience of your website and is a key way to understand and improve your site performance. So we’re happy to extend the Site Speed report with more metrics in Google Analytics to help site owners improve performance.

So what’s new?
In the Site Speed report we’re exposing a new set of metrics available in the “Technical” section that can be found in each one of the Site Speed tabs (Explorer, Performance, andMap Overlay).

   Where to access the Site Speed Technical section 



   Site Speed with Technical section metrics overlayed

What are the new metrics and what you can do with them?
The Technical section of the Explorer and Map Overlay tabs provides details on the network and server metrics. Similarly, the additional sections of the Performance tab shows summaries for each of these metrics. These network and server metrics are one component of Avg. Page Load Time; the other component is browser time, i.e., the browser overhead for parsing and executing the JavaScript, rendering the page and other overheads such as fetching additional resources (scripts/stylesheets/images).

In addition to Avg. Page Load Time, the Site Speed report displays the following network and server metrics in the Technical sections:

• Avg. Redirection Time - the time spent in redirection before fetching this page. If there are no redirects, the value for this metric is expected to be 0.
• Avg. Domain Lookup Time - the average amount of time spent in DNS lookup for this page.
• Avg. Server Connection Time - the time needed for the user to connect to your server.
• Avg. Server Response Time - the time for your server to respond to a user request, including the network time from the user’s location to your server.
• Avg. Page Download Time - the time to download your page.

We hope you’ll gain insights into how your site performs for your users from this newly updated report and be able to use it to optimize your pages. 

Thanks,
The Google Analytics Site Speed team