Monthly heatmap

The monthly heatmap sits on a site’s Overview, under the queries and pages table. Each row is a query or a page, each tile is a calendar month, and the darker the tile, the stronger that month was. It shows which content is growing, which is fading and when it peaked.

It always shows the last 12 months, so the date range at the top does not change it. Your filters (exact row filters, the filter builder, the branded split and content groups) do.

How to use it

1. Choose Queries or Pages, then a metric: Clicks, Impressions, CTR or Position.
2. Choose the shading: Row peak (each row against its own best month), Table peak (every row against the strongest tile, square-root scale) or YoY change (each month against the same month a year earlier: blue is better, red is worse, grey is no change; full colour is a 60% change, or 5 positions for Position; hatched grey means there is no year-ago month).
3. Pick Compare (the last full month against the 12-month average, the prior month, last year, the 3-month trend or the peak) and Sort (last full month, biggest drops, biggest gains, peak month, name).
4. Type in the box to narrow the rows. Show all lists every loaded row (the top 100 by clicks are loaded).
5. Click a row name to filter the whole report to it. Click a month name to set the report’s date range to that month; a Range chip appears with an x to go back to your preset.

The current month is marked MTD (month to date) and hatched. For clicks and impressions it is shaded by pace (the amount so far scaled to a full month) and is never counted as a row’s peak.

Hover a tile or move to it with the keyboard to see the exact value, the share of the row’s peak, the change against the previous month and the same month last year. Keyboard: arrow keys move between tiles, Home and End jump to the ends of a row, Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End to the first and last row, Page Up and Page Down move five rows, Enter on a name filters, Escape closes the tooltip.

Plans. Pro uses all the history we store. Free sees its 16-month window: the 12 months shown are always complete, but the oldest of them have no year-ago month to compare with, so they are hatched under YoY change. Rows only list queries or pages with impressions in those months, so they do not add up to your site totals (why).

Queries that match your brand terms carry a small Brand tag (Pro). Not in the app yet: heatmaps on the page and query detail pages.