A webmaster asked how to measure Google Discover so they can track their performance metrics.
John explained that the only way to measure it is in Search Console. In Google Analytics, the traffic is almost always folded into Google Search.
And you can’t separate them.
The Discover team decided that because Discover is a part of search, they didn’t want to put in the effort to separate them.
This discussion happens at approximately 50:02 in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
Hi. Hi, John. Thanks for the question. My question is regarding the performance measurement of Google discover. So basically, I have a client whose site is up for, I think, seven or eight years, and we have great content over this website. And what I’m seeing is for a particular day, and for a particular page, if search console is showing you, let’s say, 100 clicks. And if you check that particular page and particular date on analytics, so it shows you the discrepancy in the sessions and the fields. So there it is showing around 20 sessions, I mean, in analytics, so there is a lot of discrepancy I saw. So what is a good way to measure the Google Discover performance?
John 50:56
I think the only way to measure it is in Search Console. Because in particular, in analytics, the traffic from Discover is almost always folded into Google search. And then you can’t separate that out. So it’s only in Search Console do you see kind of the the bigger picture.
Webmaster 9 51:23
Alright. Okay, so there is another question. It’s okay if we should look at Search Console, basically, as you say, but if we are going to so a lot people say like, this traffic goes to the direct channel medium. So I mean, why is that? Is there any particular reason for that?
John 51:47
I don’t know. I think it’s something that the product team just decided to do like that in the beginning. So in particular discover we see as a part of Google search, so we don’t separate it out. And in analytics, it might be that I don’t know exactly how they would even track that they’re in which category, but at least the Discover team, they basically decided, well, Discover is a part of search, so we’re not going to separate it out.
