Docs / Understanding your data
Understanding your data
What the numbers are measuring, and what they are not.
The health score
Every published post gets a score from 0 to 100. It is not a Google ranking and it is not an opinion about your writing. It is seven measurable things about the post, weighted and added up.
| Factor | Weight | What it looks at |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic trend | 30 | Clicks over the last 30 days against the 30 before that |
| Position trend | 20 | Whether average position is improving or slipping |
| Internal links in | 20 | How many of your own posts link to this one |
| Word count | 15 | Whether the post has enough substance to compete |
| Recency | 15 | How long since the post was last meaningfully updated |
| Featured image | 10 | Whether one is set |
| Meta completeness | 10 | Excerpt, SEO title and description |
Those weights total 120, which is then scaled to a 0 to 100 score so the number is easy to read. Click any post to open its detail panel and see the exact breakdown, factor by factor, with the reason for each one.
The breakdown is recorded when the post is scored, not recalculated in your browser. So what the panel shows is genuinely the arithmetic behind the number you are looking at. A post scored before an older version of the plugin added this shows "not available yet" until the next sync.
The three health bands
- Healthy is 75 and above.
- Needs attention is 40 to 74.
- Critical is below 40.
A brand new post tends to score around the middle even though it has done nothing wrong, because the traffic and position factors have no data behind them yet. Do not read a fresh post's score as a judgement.
Trend
The arrow in the Trend column compares the last 30 days of clicks to the 30 before. Rising, falling and flat mean what they say. A star means the post is new enough that there is nothing to compare against yet.
"Possibly seasonal"
A drop is not always decay. If most of your other posts fell at the same time, or the same post fell in the same weeks last year, PostPulse labels the drop as possibly seasonal and says which of those two signals fired.
It labels rather than hides, because a seasonal dip is still real and you may want to know. If you would rather not be told, Settings, Alerts has an option to skip alerts for anything flagged seasonal.
Content staleness
Based on when the post was last modified, not when it was published.
- Fresh, up to 6 months
- Aging, 6 months to a year
- Stale, 1 to 2 years
- Critical, over 2 years
Technical fixes made by PostPulse, such as adding one internal link or swapping an SEO title, deliberately do not reset this clock. Those are not the substantive review the staleness label is trying to measure, and letting them count would let small automated edits pass as a content refresh.
How much history you have
This is worth understanding properly, because the numbers are easy to misread.
Free reaches back 30 days and Pro reaches back 90. That is how far back each sync asks Google, not how long PostPulse keeps what it collects. Data already collected is kept and is never deleted.
The practical effect is that your history grows the whole time the plugin is installed, on either plan. A site that has been running PostPulse for a year has a year of stored data even on Free. What Pro buys you is a deeper window on each sync, which matters most when you first install, and for backfilling after a gap.
This is why year over year comparisons appear later. Checking whether a drop also happened this time last year needs data from last year, and nobody has that on day one. It starts working once the plugin has been collecting for about thirteen months, whichever plan you are on.
Why the graph stops before today
Google only serves Search Console data once it has finalised it, which takes a day or two. Until then it returns nothing for those days. A gap of one to two days between today and the last point on your chart is Search Console working normally.
There is more on this, and what to check if the gap is bigger, in Getting started.
Clicks, impressions, CTR and position
- Impressions are how often your page appeared in results.
- Clicks are how often someone chose it.
- CTR is clicks divided by impressions. A page ranking well with a poor CTR usually has a title or description problem rather than a content problem, which is exactly what the action queue looks for.
- Position is your average rank, so lower is better. A post that has never ranked shows a dash rather than a zero, because no position is not the same as position zero.
Which posts are included
PostPulse scores published posts. Pages, drafts and other post types are not scored and are not crawled as link sources, though pages can still be the target of a link.
Next: turn the diagnosis into work in The action queue.