{
  "slug": "pop-delta-pct",
  "name": "Period-over-period change, relative",
  "aliases": [
    "Delta %",
    "Percent change",
    "deltaPct"
  ],
  "definition": "The period-over-period change expressed relative to the comparison period rather than in the metric's own units.",
  "category": "Search performance",
  "type": "derived metric",
  "unit": "relative change",
  "direction": "neutral",
  "verification": "review",
  "aggregation": "Computed per row from that row's own two values; null whenever the comparison value is zero, because the ratio is undefined rather than infinite.",
  "grain": "One row key × the pair of periods.",
  "dimensions": [
    "query",
    "page",
    "country",
    "device",
    "intent",
    "category"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "date range",
    "comparison range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "search-console"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "ai-referral-traffic-report",
    "content-decay-report",
    "content-performance-report",
    "keyword-ranking-report",
    "monthly-executive-search-report",
    "weekly-search-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "weekly-search-report",
    "rank-movement-review",
    "significance-referee",
    "anomaly-investigator"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "compare_periods",
    "search_performance",
    "gsc_breakdown",
    "significance_check"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R2",
    "R5"
  ],
  "levers": [],
  "questions": [
    "What was the percentage change in clicks versus last month?",
    "Which pages fell more than 20 percent?"
  ],
  "caveats": [
    "Null when the comparison value is zero, a row that went from nothing to something has no relative change, only an absolute one.",
    "Relative change on a small base is large by arithmetic; the movement classification and the significance verdict exist precisely because this number alone cannot rank findings."
  ],
  "freshness": "1 to 2 days behind, Google's own reporting lag. Any answer touching the last 48 hours says so on the card.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Multiplying an already-percent value by 100 a second time, or reading a fraction as a percent, depending on which code path produced it.",
    "Ranking a worklist by relative change and filling it with rows that moved from two clicks to four."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "real-noise-verdict",
      "why": "A relative change is a magnitude; a significance verdict is a test result at an alpha. Neither implies the other, and no effect size is computed on either side."
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "pop-delta",
    "ranking-movement"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}