How Does Google Discover Report Traffic in Google Analytics?
Google Discover is a feature where Google recommends articles based upon a user’s search history. You might see Google’s recommended articles when you visit google.com from a mobile device.
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Another place you might have seen this is in your Google Search Console report- under “performance”. This shows you a graph of impressions and clicks (and CTR) for articles Google has served from your website in Google Discover. Not every site has this data because not every site qualifies to show up in Google Discover.
Does Google Discovery Traffic matter?
When I see graphs like this, I ask one question: how do these visitors help my business? Sure, impressions are nice and clicks are great but is it leading to more business? If they are, then I might want to get more out of this!
To answer this question, I need to turn to Google Analytics. Because I’ve setup goal tracking (or ecommerce tracking on a shop) I know whether visitors become customers. This tells me whether or not that traffic is valuable. Otherwise, impressions (and even clicks) are just vanity metrics.
In order to determine whether or not this traffic is producing business, I need to understand how this traffic is being reported in GA.
Since Google Discover articles are recommended on the Google homepage, you might expect them to show up as the source/medium: Google/referral. After all, it’s a referral link from the website google.com. If you look there, however, you’ll not find any traffic (ever!).
Perhaps this is because google.com isn’t just any website- it’s a search engine. Google Analytics attributes those visits to a special category/medium, “organic”. Now, as an SEO, I get a good amount of traffic from google/organic. How can I distinguish “normal” google/search traffic from Google Discover traffic?
To do this I looked in my Google Search Console. I see a couple articles producing traffic from Google Discover. The graph tells me when those visitors came and to what page they arrived. With a couple clicks, I can download this information and reproduce the graph in Excel. If you download this as CSV you’ll get a zip file. Look in the “Dates.csv” file and you’ll find this data.
To find this data in GA I first went to the Acquisition report and then Default Channel Groupings. Since I don’t know which default grouping I want, I changed the dimension to “landing page”. I took one of the landing pages that Google Search Console said is sending Discover traffic and entered it into the search field- this limits traffic to this page.
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Please feel free to visit us at: https://webigg.com/