Some of the features described in this article might be available only for Tracked Campaigns. Learn more.
SEOmonitor’s Visibility trend explainer highlights how rankings and search volume changes affected the Visibility metric of a campaign or keyword group for a specific timeframe.
How does this work?
As the Visibility metric is computed based on keyword rankings and average search volumes, the explainer shows what’s going on, on two levels:
It shows how much of the Visibility trend was due to keywords that improved/dropped in rankings and how much of it was due to the changes in the search volumes of the keywords. It also highlights which keywords were excluded from the performance-only Visibility trend, because they were not tracked from the beginning of the selected timeframe. More on the latter below.
The list of keywords that had changes in rankings and search volumes, ordered by how much those changes affected the Visibility.
Performance-only Visibility trend
When processing the Visibility trend as a number and not as a graph (ex: “+34%”), the system only considers the Visibility trend generated by the keywords tracked for the entire selected timeframe, ignoring the ones that were removed or added later than the start date. It does that so it always shows the change in Visibility based on the performance of the website for the same set of tracked keywords, not being distorted by the keywords that were added or removed throughout the selected timeframe.
When you remove keywords from a group or archive them, the Visibility is recalculated retroactively. The effect of this will be as if the keywords were never tracked.
So the removed/archived keywords will not be present in the explainer of the selected group's view as ignored keywords. However, these keywords can be seen in the explainer as ignored keywords under the All Keywords view. Adding to the group keywords that are already tracked in the campaign, has the same behavior.
However, if the keywords are new to the campaign, they will not influence the Visibility historically, and they will be displayed in the explainer.
If a keyword has been tracked, then archived, then reactivated within the timeframe, the Visibility is calculated retroactively according to the data they stored, and if the selected timeframe includes days without data, they will be present in the baseline explainer.
We call this the performance-only Visibility trend. The Visibility explainer details it, while also highlighting what keywords were ignored from the calculation and why.
Each device's Visibility trend gets its own detailed explanation.
The SERP feature Visibility trend is an adapted version of the explainer. Read more about it in the dedicated article.
Use-case
To investigate what happened after a significant drop in the campaign’s Visibility, without the Visibility trend explainer, you’d have to filter and sort the keywords by search volumes and rank changes, to get some insights. And it still wouldn’t be reliable enough.
However, with the explainer, clicking on any Visibility trend data opens a sidebar detailing which changes contributed the most to the drop. This helps you quickly get to the root cause – or at least get clues that would lead you to the root cause.