Goal: The goal of Google Search is to organize world's information and make it universally accessible.
User Segmentation:
- Users: Who use search to find information (students, researchers, casual searcher)
- Businesses - Who use search to drive traffic to their businesses (eCommerce, Local Businesses)
For this question, I'll choose to address the key metrics for the Users:
Pain Points / Use Cases:
- To find relevant information (better search results based on user intent)
- To find information efficiently (to be able to quickly understand what the links are leading to)
Based on the use cases of the users, we can define the most important metrics to track.
Metrics to Track:
%age of exits - how many people could not find any relevant search results and just left the page
CTRs - a higher CTR indicates higher relevance of the results
Number of results loaded - if the user couldn't find relevant results in top 10 and goes on to explore more results.. This again indicates irrelavant top results
Time spent on SERPs - to identify if the users are able to find relevant information quickly
Out of these, I would choose %age of Exits as the most important Metric as it summarizes all the other sub metrics and it has a direct impact on the business.
Would be happy to receive any feedback on this :)