Year-over-Year Dashboard
The YoY Dashboard compares the selected reporting window against the same calendar window in the previous year. For any business with seasonality — and almost every site has some seasonality — period-over-period comparisons can mislead, while year-over-year tells you whether the structural health of your search performance is improving, holding, or decaying once you control for seasonal effects.
What it measures
- Current period — clicks, impressions, CTR and average position over the selected window.
- Prior year — the same metrics over the matching calendar window 365 days earlier.
- YoY delta — absolute and percentage change for each metric.
How we compute it
- For both windows we sum daily clicks and impressions; CTR is recomputed at window-total level (not averaged across days) and average position is impression-weighted.
- The prior-year window is anchored to the same start and end month-day, exactly 365 days earlier (366 across a leap-year boundary).
- Deltas are shown as both absolute differences and percentage changes for at-a-glance reading.
Scenarios you'll see
Clicks and impressions both up double digits YoY with stable or improving position. Brand and topical authority are compounding. Stay the course.
Period-over-period looks fine but YoY is down. Often the first place Helpful Content / quality-update damage shows up; cross-check Content Decay.
Current period is up vs. last month but flat YoY. Last month's lift was seasonality, not real growth. Don't celebrate the wrong number.
Bigger SERP footprint YoY but CTR has compressed. Likely AI-overview / featured-snippet expansion. Lean into schema, brand, and rich titles.
Sharp YoY swing tied to a specific Google update window. Note the update in your annotations and benchmark forward from the new baseline.
YoY position better but YoY clicks worse. Almost always SERP-feature dampening. Treat your CTR Curve as the new normal.
What to do with it
- Treat YoY as the truth metric for board-level reporting. Period-over-period is for tactical diagnostics; YoY is for strategy.
- Annotate big algorithm or business events on Traffic Trend; YoY readings near those dates need the extra context.
- Pair with Winners and Losers + Rising / Falling Pages to localise where the YoY change is coming from.
Caveats & limits
- Sites with less than ~13 months of data won't have a meaningful YoY view yet.
- Major business changes (a relaunch, migration, scope change) make YoY apples-to-oranges; flag these as annotations.
- Calendar quirks (Easter moving, leap day, holiday placement) introduce a small amount of noise; trust trends over single-period readings.
Related reports
- Traffic Trend — the daily series both windows are computed from.
- Winners and Losers — page- and query-level period-over-period winners.
- Content Decay — YoY decline often shows up here first at the URL level.