Help refining Search referrals - Google search vs Google Discover

[leo28]

Hi!

We are trying to give our stakeholders more details on our referrals to the sites.

One of the details we would like to offer is a break out of Google Search vs Google Discover.

Is there a way of discerning this through Adobe Analytics?

Thank you

[kayawalton]

Hi @leo28 --

For Google Discover, I use Referring Domains equals googleapis.com.

For Google Search, I use any Referrer containing Google, BUT there are a couple of things to consider that you may want to add conditions based on your answers to these questions:

• If you are a news organization or have a presence on Google News and only want to look at Google Search, you may want to exclude Referrer containing news.google.com. 
• If you are or have been tracking Google AMP pages, you may want to filter those out depending on how you implemented your tracking. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

To add to what @kayawalton said, using the referring domains, you can create segments for the different variants of google.

I created one for Google Showcase and one for Google News  (I haven't done discover yet), so I could see All Google against these specific Google variants. 

For me, showing as a sub-set of the general Google is fine, but if I need to have them in isolation, I could create a segment for Google and exclude the visits from Google Showcase and Google News... and Discover or any other variant.

[leo28]

Thank you @Jennifer_Dungan! 

I appreciate it.

Yes, I agree! We are using referring domains to reclassify some of our referrals. But we haven't found a way of isolating the Google Discover ones... they seem to be very prominent in the Google Console so I would like to isolate them and report on them.

Let me know if you have additional suggestions!

[leo28]

Hi @kayawalton thank you for your response!

I tried the Google Discover recommendation and it doesn't seem to work in my case.

There is barely any traffic with googleapis.com as their referring domain and the Google console data says it is very significant.

Is there anything else we would need to do to track this?

For AMP pages and Google News we are fine at the moment... the main issue here is trying to identify the Google Discover traffic. Any other suggestion will be well received!