Trying to track your clicks and impressions from Google Search Console seems pretty straight forward right?
That is until you start to see queries getting impressions that don't have anything to do with your site and that might not even be mentioned on a page.
There are a few explanations for spikes in impressions and clicks:
Sitelinks: Sitelinks for branded searches can lead to spikes in impressions and clicks for the pages that are included in your sitelinks
PAA: People Also Asked links get impressions and sometimes clicks for the websites where the data is being pulled from
Twitter Carousel: Twitter carousels appear from some topic searches, companies and people (most commonly for branded searches)
Images: Image in search results are not uncommon in many industries and can lead to a lot of impressions but few clicks
The Twitter Carousel is what this case study is focusing on.
I wrote a blog post about some of the features I like best in Wix Analytics. Then suddenly I started seeing impressions for "Mordy Oberstein"
I started to try and figure out how and why I was getting these Impressions when Mordy is not mentioned even a single time on my website
So I Google'd a few of these queries that were appearing and I realized Mordy has a Twitter Carousel for his name:
So What happened?
After a little digging, I found that Mordy has shared a blog post I wrote, about Wix Analytics, on Twitter, for a short time (he tweets often) that blog post appeared in the Google SERP in his Twitter Carousel. Since the carousel is on the SERP, Google Search Console recognized the impressions each time it was triggered.
All of the impressions were only for that one specific URL that was tweeted.