Which country deserves Q4 effort
🌍 Search Console now lets you filter several countries at once, so sort your international markets into a simple holiday grid.
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🌍 Sort your international markets into four boxes before the holidays
Until this week, comparing international markets in Search Console meant checking one country at a time. On October 6, Google added multi-select country filters to the performance report, so you can select several together, such as the US and Canada, and see their combined search traffic in one view.
For stores shipping abroad, that makes a quick Q4 triage possible.
Step 1: Pull two numbers per market
For each country you ship to, export the last 90 days and the same 90 days a year ago. You need:
- Demand growth: impressions this year against last year
- Capture: click-through rate at a similar average position to your home market
Compare CTR only within a similar position band, such as positions 1 to 5. A market where you rank 12th will always have lower CTR. That band is my judgment.
Step 2: Place each market on the grid
Growing demand, strong capture. Your best bet for Q4. Give it a localized holiday landing page, local currency prices, and a market-specific shipping cutoff.
Growing demand, weak capture. Shoppers are searching and seeing you, but not clicking. Check your titles and snippets as that market sees them. Prices in the wrong currency, missing local shipping info, or the wrong language version are the usual suspects.
Flat demand, strong capture. Keep it running and avoid spending new effort here before January.
Flat demand, weak capture. Deprioritize for Q4 and revisit in the new year.
Step 3: Group markets into clusters
Use the multi-select filter to compare whole clusters of countries. Examples:
- The UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand as one English-language cluster
- Germany, Austria and Switzerland together
- The US and Canada combined, then split
If a cluster performs well overall but one country lags, that country likely has a local issue, such as currency, shipping cost or a missing language version.
A worked example
Say Canada's impressions are up 40% year on year, but its CTR is 2.1% against 4.0% for the US at similar positions. Canadian shoppers are seeing you and skipping you.
Search your top products from a Canadian location. If results show US dollar prices or US-only shipping, that's the leak. Fix pricing display and add a Canada shipping page before Black Friday.
Step 4: Recheck in four weeks
Re-run the grid in early November. Any market that moved from weak to strong capture earns a share of your holiday budget.
The afternoon task
Pull 90 days by country and sort it into the four boxes. One afternoon decides where your international effort goes this season.
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