Google Adds Report to Show How Discover Feed Affects Your Site

For online marketers, knowing how your audience finds the content you create is valuable information. Most online campaigns try to reach audiences in a variety of ways, and it’s useful to know which methods produce the best results. Searching isn’t the only way people find content on Google and the company has added a new report to make it easier to see when that happens. Marketers can use Google Search Console to get data on how well a site is performing in the Discover Feed.

If you have used Google on your mobile device, it’s likely that you have seen the Discover Feed and not realized it. When you first go to Google on a mobile device, there is a list of articles you may find interesting. These links and materials are the Discover Feed, and they are designed to lead users to content that matches their preferences without having to search for it.

Users of the Discover Feed can follow topics directly or tell Google to show the user more or fewer articles from a specific topic. The algorithm “surfaces the best of the web regardless of publication date, from recipes and human interest stories, to fashion videos and more.” Since launching in 2017, the feature is used by more than 800 million users every month.

Google’s Discover Feed is a useful tool for consumers, but the advantages can be harder for marketers to detect. The new reporting in the Search Console will make it easier to see the effect that the Discover Feed is having on your traffic.

As Google stated in an announcement on the new report, “The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019. We hope this report is helpful in thinking about how you might optimize your content strategy to help users discover engaging information– both new and evergreen.”

According to Google, marketers can use the reports to answer common questions website owners have about the way the Discover Feed affects them. Looking at the report will answer questions such as:

• How often is my site shown in users’ Discover?
• How large is my traffic?
• Which pieces of content perform well in Discover?
• How does my content perform differently in Discover compared to traditional search results?

Marketers can’t decide where, when, or if their content will be shown in the Discover Feed. This is determined by the algorithm and the users. However, Google has provided some useful

guidance for website owners on how to optimize their content for the Discover Feed. Following these instructions will make it easier for Google to place materials from that website in the Discover Feed.

Formatting your content so that it gets surfaced and placed by Google Discover is a smart marketing tactic for content marketers. For more recent news about changes and updated to Google, read this article on the announcement that Google will delist certain content with exploitative removal policies.