What’s the difference? Position Tracking Pages vs. Traffic Analytics Top Pages

In both the Pages tab in Position Tracking and the Top Pages tab in Traffic Analytics, Semrush shows a list of landing pages on a domain and their estimated traffic. 

However, there is a difference in the data you see in these tools. The difference relates to different methods of data collection, the resulting data, and the purposes of these tools.

Data collection

Traffic Analytics: makes estimations based on analyzing clickstream data on all of a domain’s sources of traffic, not just from search.

Position Tracking: makes estimations based solely on URLs positions on SERP and their estimated traffic (keyword search volume multiplied by average CTR). When configuring Position Tracking, you’ll be asked to insert your target keywords.

Resulting data

Traffic Analytics: The Top Pages report in this tool shows a list of up to 1000 pages (depending on the domain), these pages are based on the pages with the highest number of unique visitors.

As with each landing page, you’ll see the number of unique page views, unique visitors, desktop/mobile visitors, and total volume of traffic generated by each source — direct, referral, social, search and paid (from Google Ads).

Position Tracking: The Pages report in this tool shows a list of pages that are ranking in Google's top-100 results in the chosen location and on the particular device (desktop or mobile) by the keywords you’ve chosen on the setup stage.

For each landing page, you’ll see the number of keywords the page has rankings for, the average position, total volume, and estimated traffic. 

The tools’ purposes

Traffic Analytics: to know the best-performing pages on your competitor’s site - it is comparable to Landing Pages report in Google Analytics, but created based on clickstream data. These stats shed light on the top externally visited content of any domain, including individual product or category pages, specific articles or sections of a site.

Position Tracking: to monitor your and your competitors’ rankings across your target keywords. This report lets you easily see which landing pages started ranking by any keyword of your campaign as well as stopped ranking, increased or declined their position.

Start gaining insights:

Traffic Analytics Top Pages - get details on how to use it here
Position Tracking Pages - more insights on how to use it here.