Performance report (Discover)

The Performance report for Discover shows important metrics about how your site performs on Discover. This report is visible only if your property has reached a minimum number of impressions in Discover.

New user?

If you're new to website analysis, start here for a simple introduction to this report.

 

Open the Discover Performance Report

 

Configuring the report

The default view of the report shows the total clicks and impressions for your property in Discover.

• Choose which metrics to see by selecting the desired metrics above the chart.
• Group your data by selecting a grouping tab in the table. You can group data by page, country, appearance type, and day.
• Optionally filter your data by dimensions such as date, page, and country.
• Optionally compare data groups: for example, you can compare impressions from Brazil and China.
• Optionally change the date range, if you want something different from the default value of the last three months. To change the date range, click the Date filter at the top of the report. When you choose the 24-hour view, the graph’s data points represent hours and include preliminary data.

Exporting report data

Many reports provide an export button to export the report data. Both chart and table data are exported. Values shown as either ~ or - in the report (not available/not a number) will be zeros in the downloaded data.

About the data

• A data row will be shown only if it has a minimum threshold of impressions in Discover. However, data for rows below this threshold will still be added to the site's totals.
• Data is limited to the time period specified by the Date filter. The default date period is the last 3 months. You can change this date range by clicking the date filter and changing the range.
• All data is aggregated by page: if two Discover results from the same property appear in the same Discover list, each impression is counted separately.
• All page metrics are assigned to the canonical URL, not to the page where the user lands when they click a Discover result. This has two important effects:
  • The URL credited in the table will be the canonical URL.
  • Data will only be shown in the property that contains the canonical URL. Therefore, if you have duplicate pages, the canonical URL will contain all data for clicks, impressions, and CTR, and the duplicate URLs will show zero for those values.
• Discover traffic is somewhat less predictable than Search traffic, in part because it is proactively served by Google rather than dependent on user queries. Therefore you might see more variation in your Discover traffic than in your Search traffic.

Preliminary data in the report:

The newest data in the Performance report is sometimes preliminary, which means it’s still being collected and will change in the next few hours.

The report shows complete days by default—preliminary data will only show when you explicitly choose a day with preliminary data in the date-range selector. Today’s data (and sometimes yesterday’s) is preliminary.

Unlike all other views, the 24-hour view where each data point represents an hour, shows preliminary data points by default.  

Preliminary data is displayed on the chart with a dotted line. When you hover the dotted line, a note appears to remind you that data is still being collected. When data points with preliminary data are selected, the tables will also display information from those days/hours.

Metrics

Choose which metrics to display by selecting the appropriate tab on the report. The following metrics are available:

Impression: The Discover item was scrolled into view, either as a standard Discover item, or embedded in a carousel. Only one impression is counted per result per session; if a user scrolls past an item and then scrolls back, only one impression is recorded. For Web Stories, an impression is counted for the story viewed in Discover, as well as for any additional story that the user opens from that initial Web Story clicked in Discover. (Impressions are not counted twice if the user saw the same Web Story multiple times in a session.)

Click: The user clicked the Discover item. A click is not counted if the user shares the item, or performs any another action. For Web Stories, a click is counted for the story clicked in Discover, as well as for any additional story that the user opens from that initial Web Story clicked in Discover.

Average CTR: Clicks/impressions.

Reading the chart

Choose which metrics to show in the chart by selecting or deselecting metrics at the top of the chart.

The totals for each metric are shown above the chart. These totals are accurate for the selected time span, and are not truncated. Daily values shown in the chart might be omitted on the chart if they do not reach a threshold, but will be included in the totals whether or not they reach the threshold.

Reading the table

The table shows data grouped by the selected dimension. Data is shown for the metrics selected in the chart above.

Note that the table is limited to 1,000 rows. The data is truncated to 1,000 rows before it reaches this report, so if the data potentially would be 1,001 rows, reversing the sort order of the table will not show the (pre-truncated) 1,001st row.

The table data is limited to the same time period as the chart, which is specified by the Date filter. Modify the date filter by clicking it and changing the date range.

Group the table data

You can group your metrics in the table by the following categories:

• Page: The page that served as the source of the information shown to the user. This is the canonical page URL, not the page where the user lands when they click a Discover result. If the canonical URL is not in this property, the alternate page URL will not appear in the table for this property.
• Country: The country where the content was viewed or clicked.
• Date: Data grouped by the day on which it occurred. The date is the Pacific Time day, not the user's local time. Data for individual days in the chart can be truncated if it falls below a certain value. Totals are for the time range specified by the date filter. This filter/dimension isn’t available when selecting the 24-hour view.
• Discover appearance: The type of page linked to by the result. One of the following values:

UI name	Description	Search Console API value	Bulk data export field
AMP articles	Any AMP page, including AMP story results.	AMP_TOP_STORIES	is_amp_top_stories
News Showcase	An article that appears in a publisher's curated News Showcase panel.	NEWS_SHOWCASE	Not supported in Bulk Data Export
Web Story	A subset of AMP articles that are optimized for visual content rather than textual content.	AMP_STORY	is_amp_story
Videos	A video on your site that appears in Discover.	VIDEO	is_video

Time zones 

When selecting the 24-hour view, the data is shown in your local time. Local time zone is based on your browser’s settings. In all other options, dates are shown in Pacific Time (PT).

Filter your data

You can filter data by date, page, country, or Discover appearance type.

To add a filter:

• Click the + NEW label next to the existing filters on the page.

To remove a filter:

• Click the X next to an existing filter. You cannot remove the date filter.

To modify a filter:

• Click the filter and change the values.

Note that filters can cause some data discrepancies

Case-sensitivity

All page URL filters are case-insensitive except for Exact URL, which is case-sensitive. This means URLs containing/not containing/exact/Custom (regex) filters, but not Exact URL filters.

You can make regular expressions case-sensitive as described below.

Regular expression filter

If you choose the Custom (regex) filter, you can filter by a regular expression (a wildcard match) for the selected item. You can use regular expression filters for page URLs and user queries. The RE2 syntax is used.

• You can choose whether to show strings that do match your regular expression or that don't match your regular expression. Default is to show strings that do match your regular expression.
• The default matching is "partial match", which means that your regular expression can match anywhere in the target string unless you use ^ or $ to require matching from the start or end of the string, respectively.
• Default regex matching is not case-sensitive. You can prepend "(?-i)" to the beginning of your regular expression string for case-sensitive matches. Example: (?-i)AAA will match https://example.com/AAA but not https://example.com/aaa
• Invalid regular expression syntax will return no matches.
• Regular expression matching is tricky; try out your expression on a live testing tool, or read the full RE2 syntax guide

Common regular expressions

Here are a few basic regular expressions:

Wildcard	Description
.	Matches any single character. "m.n" matches "men" and "man" but not "meen"
[characters]	Matches any single item inside [ ]. "c[aie]t" matches "cat", "cit", and "cet" "i[o0-9]n" matches "ion" and "i7n" but not "ian"
*	Matches the preceding letter or pattern zero or more times: "fo*d" matches "fd", "fod", "food", and "foooooooood" "https*://example" matches http://example" and "https://example"
+	Matches the preceding letter or pattern 1 or more times "fo+d" matches "fod", "food", "foooooooood" but not "fd"
|	OR operator, matches either the expression before or after the | operator. "New York|San Francisco" matches both "I love New York" and "I love San Francisco"
\d	One digit 0-9 "\d\d\d abc" matches "123 abc"
\D	Any non-digit (for example, any letter, or characters such as + or , or ?) "\D\D\D 123" matches "aaa 123" but not "123 123"
\s	Any whitespace (tab, space) "1\s2\s3" matches "1 2 3"
\S	Any non-whitespace. (\S)+ matches "fire" "and" "ice" in the string "fire and ice", but none of the spaces, and not the whole string.
(?-i)	Specifies case-sensitive matches for all following characters. "(?-i)AAA will match https://example.com/AAA but not https://example.com/aaa
^	At the start of your expression, limits matches to the start of the target string. "^example" matches "example" but not "an example" "example" matches both "example" and "an example"

Compare groups

You can compare data between two groups of the same type. For example, you can compare data between France and England (countries), or between this month and last month (dates). The comparison appears in both the chart and the table.

To compare data for groups:

1. Comparisons are managed by filters (for example, Date or Search type). Either edit an existing filter or click New to add a new filter.
2. In the filter properties dialog box, choose Compare.
3. Add the dimensions or times to compare, and click Apply.
4. You can have only one comparison at a time. Adding a new comparison filter will clear the existing comparison. For example, if you are comparing dates, and then add a comparison between countries, the country comparison will erase the date comparison.

You can compare data in only one dimension at a time (Date, Country, and so on). Adding a new comparison in another grouping dimension will remove the existing comparison. For example, if you are comparing clicks for this week versus last week (Date), and then add a comparison between US and Japan (Country), the country comparison will erase the date comparison, and date range will reset to the default.

Data discrepancies

Discrepancies between chart totals and table totals

You can see differences between the chart totals and the table totals for several reasons:

General:

• In some unusual cases, when you filter on a page, you might see a discrepancy between chart and table data. This is because the data is truncated differently, depending on the grouping and filtering combinations used. In these cases, when the totals differ, the actual total will be at least the larger value shown (and possibly more).
• When filtering by page, the "contains" and "does not contain" totals might not add up to the unfiltered total. For example, adding the totals for "URLs containing 'https://'" and "URLs not containing 'https://'" might be lower than the totals without a URLs filter. This is because data is truncated due to serving limitations.
• Adding an ineffective filter (such as filtering results to your site's root URL - "example.com/") can cause discrepancies for various reasons.

Chart totals higher:

• The table can show a maximum of 1,000 rows, so some rows might be omitted.

Discrepancies between Search Console and other data sources

Search Console data can differ slightly from the data displayed in other tools. Here are possible reasons for the differences:

• There can be a lag between when the numbers are calculated and when they are visible to site owners. Although data gets published in intervals, we continually collect it. Normally, however, collected data should be available in 2-3 days. The report can also include preliminary data.
• Data from the last 2 days may be preliminary. 
• Time zones matter. In all views (except the 24-hour view), the Performance report tracks and labels daily data in Pacific Time (PT). If your other systems use different time zones, your daily views may not match exactly. For example, the site owner can set the reporting time zone in Google Analytics..
• Table totals might be less than the chart totals. The table is limited to 1,000 rows, which can limit the amount of data shown.