Google Introduces Performance Report for Google News Publishers

Google has launched a new Search Console performance report for sites that appear in Google News. Publishers can now track clicks, impressions, and CTR for traffic coming from news.google.com and the Google News apps for Android and iOS.

The report helps publishers see how often their articles appear to users in Google News and which ones performed the best. It also includes breakdowns for countries, devices, and dates to give publishers a better overall understanding of how visitors are interacting with their content through Google News. Although the date period defaults to the last three months, the data only goes as far back as December 15, 2020.

In the past, publishers had to submit their sites to be eligible for inclusion in Google News but the policy changed in 2019. Sites are now automatically considered for Top stories or the News tab of Search as long as they “produce high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies.”

This new report does not include stats from the News tab on Google Search. That information was added in July 2020, when Google updated the Performance report section of its Search Console to allow publishers to filter by News. This screen also lets users compare different traffic sources, i.e. Web vs News to see the impact of articles showing up under the News tab.

The new report can be grouped by dimensions to get more specific information with different combinations of date ranges, reader locations, devices, and pages. For example, you can get a detailed look at clicks, impressions, and average CTR on a per country basis. This can also be filtered for one certain article to explore more narrow branches of the content’s reach.

Publishers who are using AMP will want to note that this new report includes data from the canonical URL. If you have multiple versions for different devices, the report contains data for both:

Data will only be shown in the property that contains the canonical URL. Therefore, if you have both AMP and desktop versions of a page, the desktop property (which is usually the canonical property) will contain all the data for both AMP and desktop clicks, impressions, and CTR.

Google has published a help document with more information on configuring the report, data discrepancies, and how to filter and compare data across groups.