Category Breakdown

What is it?

Category Breakdown is the first tab in Advanced Analytics. It shows your Search Console and GA4 numbers for each category — a group of pages, such as Blog or Products, that you define in the Category Builder.

Why use it?

• To see which parts of your site bring the most traffic and conversions.
• To spot growing and declining categories.
• To find pages close to page one, or pages with a weak click-through rate.

Before you start

• Connect GA4, Search Console or both.
• Add rules in the Category Builder. Until you do, Prism shows No Category Builder rules yet — every URL below is grouped as Uncategorized until you add rules to split them into categories. with an Open Category Builder button.

How to use it

1. Open Advanced Analytics

   On the Analytics (GA4 + GSC) screen, click Advanced Analytics. The Category Breakdown tab opens.

2. Pick your dates

   Use the pills or the date picker. Keep Compare on to see movers. See Date ranges and compare.

3. Filter, if you want

   Next to Filter:, use Category: and Sub-category:. Search, tick items, or click Select all or Clear. Click Clear filters to reset.

4. Read from top to bottom

   Start with Executive Summary, then work down to Category Detail.

Understanding the screen

Prism

Screenshot coming soon

Executive Summary

Every comparison below shows the number and the % change together. Cards: Sessions, Clicks, Impressions, Avg. CTR, Avg. Position, Categorized. Each card says vs X prior period or vs X last year.

Visibility Funnel

Impressions → CTR → Clicks → GA4 sessions (separate tracking) → Sessions → Engaged sessions → Conversions. Clicks and sessions come from separate systems and won't match exactly. See Reading charts.

Sessions vs Clicks Trend

Site-wide, organic — not filtered to the categories above.

Category Intelligence

• Share of voice — each category's share of Google-organic sessions. It adds up to 100%. The top 7 are listed, and the rest are grouped as All other categories (N).
• Business impact by category.
• Engagement rate by category — categories with at least 20 sessions.
• Conversion rate by category — conversions ÷ sessions, at least 20 sessions.

Category Momentum & Impact

The Category momentum matrix puts each category in one of four boxes. Volume = sessions + clicks, compared with the median category.

Also in this section:

• Category health scorecard — Category, Sessions, Clicks, CTR, Position.
• Ranking position distribution — Position 1-3, 4-10, 11-20, 21-50, 50+.
• Content efficiency by category (sessions per URL), New users by category and URL coverage growth by category.

Page-Level Opportunities

These tables include pages with at least 20 impressions or sessions.

Click a row in the quick-win table to open Position & CTR over time. The purple line is Position (higher on chart = better rank), with a CTR line next to it. Each table has an Excel icon (Export to Excel).

Audience Quality

New users % of sessions, Engagement rate and Conversion rate.

Category Detail

Cards: Categories, GA4 Sessions (categorized), GSC Clicks (categorized). The last card adds of N total in Search Console — the rest is the (not set) row below.

The table has Category, Sub-category, Sessions, New users, Engagement, Avg. duration, Conversions, Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Position and URLs. A (not set) row comes last. See (not set) explained.

Understanding the data

• CTR = clicks ÷ impressions. See CTR.
• Position = average weighted by impressions.
• With no category filter, Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Position totals are Search Console's own site totals.
• Striking distance = position 11–20. See striking distance.

Typical CTR

Typical CTR is the CTR this site normally gets at a position. Prism uses your own CTR at that position when it has at least 200 impressions there. It can borrow from up to 3 positions either side. Hover text: From this site's own data.

Otherwise it uses fixed estimates (hover text: Estimated — not enough of this site's own data at this position yet):

Quick-win rule

A page is a quick-win when its position is 20 or better and typical CTR minus actual CTR is more than 1 point.

Example

For example, your Blog page is at position 5 with a 3% CTR. Your site's typical CTR at position 5 is 7%. The gap is 4 points, so the page appears in Quick-win CTR. Rewrite its title and meta description to earn more clicks.

Tips

• Start with Stars and Watch list in the momentum matrix.
• Check Striking distance pages first. A small push can move them onto page one.

Common issues