Why are my Position Tracking results different in Google?

The most common reason you would see different results is because your personal location and browser settings are different than the location set in your Position Tracking campaign.

Are you tracking a client’s rankings for a business located in San Diego but Googling from your office in Minneapolis? You probably won’t see the same results.

This is because Position Tracking shows unbiased SERP results, while Google shows personalized SERP results.

When you search on Google from a personal device, Google personalizes its results according to multiple factors. Some of these factors include:

• Location
• Previous Search History
• Browsing History
• Language preferences

To find out all of the different factors, we recommend checking out the Google Support article here.

Even if you try your search in Incognito Mode and check your location to confirm that it matches your Project, it might not serve the same unbiased results as Position Tracking.

Check Your Location

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of your Google results page, you can see the location that Google is using to serve your results.

In Position Tracking, you can check the location of your campaign at the top of the interface.

We offer the ability to track positions on a national level, state level, city level, and even zip code level.

If the location in your Position Tracking and personal device are not exactly the same (different zip codes in the same city will serve different results), then you could see different results. Therefore, it is best to track your campaign in the most specific location that you are trying to target with your website.

The second reason why you could possibly see a difference would be due to the volatility of the SERPs you’re tracking.

Search Volatility

Another factor that is often overlooked when it comes to your search is volatility. This just means that search results can change many times over a given day as a result of new content and Google’s crawling schedule.

Depending on the time of the day that our updates occur and the time of your search, you could see a slight difference in your results.

Keep in mind our Position Tracking tool updates your data every 24-48 hours.

This daily update is the industry standard and normally enough to see any positive, negative or neutral correlations between marketing efforts and rankings.