In a recent development, Google has improved the data freshness in the Search Console performance report (which helps webmasters and site owners better understand how their site performs on Google search). Users can now see data as recent as less than a day old, which is a significant improvement compared to the few days it previously took to display.
In addition, the data timezone (Pacific time zone) has been clearly stated. This is useful when wanting to interpret the data compared to a local time zone or integrate it with other sources such as Google Analytics.
The report assists by answering questions such as these:
- General stats: How much traffic did my site get from Search and Discover?
- Search queries: What are my site’s top and trending search queries?
- Top content: What are my site’s most successful pages on Google search?
- Site’s audiences: From which countries? From which devices – is it mostly mobile?
- Formats: What search formats does my site get (AMP, recipes, etc.)?
It also addresses some important needs such as:
- Seeing weekend performance on Monday morning – no need to wait until Wednesday.
- Checking on the site’s stats first thing in the morning after, or even during important days such as holidays, global events, and shopping days.
- Checking if the site’s traffic rebounds soon after fixing an important technical issue.
Each fresh data point will be replaced with the final data point after a few days and it’s expected that from time to time the fresh data might change a bit before being finalised.
It’s now possible to export performance data over time by choosing ‘dates’ in the table below the graph, select the desired time frame and then exporting the chart, (or by exploring the data in Search Console).
The Search Analytics API does not support fresh data yet and fresh data is not available on the Discover performance report. As a result, properties that are eligible for Discover performance report will not see fresh data in their Overview report but those items will be addressed in the future.
Google hopes that this new fresh data will help Webmasters to better monitor a site’s performance and identify trends, patterns and interesting changes much closer to when they happen and that the new date table dimension will assist in exploring performance trends and changes over time.
If you want to know more about how the fresh data can help your business, please get in touch.