Underwhelmed by Search Console: Data driven statistics that are meaningless

[Broadway]

I've been looking at search stats for individual pages in Search Console.
I've noticed the "avg. position" for "queries" statistic they post at the top of the page.

I have one page that seems to rank for 72 queries (keywords).
The "avg. position" for the page for all of these queries is stated to be 18.1 (to say the least I was disappointed).
When looking at the "avg. position" for each individual query, there is only a single one that has a rank higher than position #18. It's something I'm not even trying to rank for and it's position is #123. There was a single (one) search (impression) for that phrase. All of the other the other queries together total about 500 impressions.

I guess my point here is what a worthless statistic.

[Andy Langton]

"Meaningless" is taking it too far. However, the sources of data cause issues in that they don't correspond to what people expect, and are often scaled. A big issue is that it reports data for personalised searches. If you're aiming to attract new visitors as a main goal, then this can be problematic, to say the least, and it can cause havoc in the numbers when very small numbers of searches have heavily personalised results.

However, the big appeal is that it's data direct from Google. There's no other source of impression data other than running Adwords.

[robzilla]

I think what you're saying is the math (the calculation of the average position) seems incorrect? It's possible they don't calculate the average based on the averages per search term, but rather on the positions of the whole set of searches, and that might lead to a different average (due to outliers, for example) than if you were to tally all the averages per search term and divide those by the number of terms.

The statistics are quite valuable to me, but they can be confusing. I might rank #2 for some search term and have an average CTR of 2%, whereas a #3 position for another term might lead to a CTR of 8%. Sometimes that means you're up against a strong competitor (brand), dominating Image or Shopping search results at the top of the page, or simply a difference in user intent. So there's a lot to ponder in there, but with the right analysis it can help you prioritize on the search phrases that have the most potential for additional growth.