Getting your performance data

You can query your performance data quickly, and without exceeding your quota, by running a daily query for one day's worth of data.

You must choose what information you want in your data: which search types (web, image, video, etc.) and which dimensions (page, query, country, or device), as well as whether to group results by page or property. When querying for page and/or query string, some data may be dropped (here's why).

Overview

We recommend running a query each day for one day's worth of data using one of the query styles described below. Running a daily query for one day of data should not exceed your daily quota. Data is typically available after 2-3 days; you can learn what is the most recently available data by running a simple query grouped by date for the past 10 days. In writing your query:
- Choose whether to group results by page or property.
- Choose whether you want more complete counts or more dimensions in your query. Note: search appearance data (AMP, blue link, rich result, and so on) must be queried using a two-step process.
Page through results by re-running the same query, increasing the startRow value by 25,000 in the request until you reach the last page (a response with 0 rows).
Optionally run the same query with another type parameter.

Here is a pseudocode example for a single query. You can run this once per day for each type value that you want data for.

int maxRows = 25000; // Current max response size
int i = 0;
do {
  response = Request(startDate = 3_days_ago,
                     endDate = 3_days_ago,
                     ... add dimensions, type ...
                     rowLimit = maxRows,
                     startRow = i * maxRows);
  i++;
  …  // Do something with the response data.
} while (response.rows.count() != 0); // Page through all result rows

Data limits

In addition to API usage quota, the Search Analytics method exposes a maximum of 50K rows of data per day per search type (web, image, and so on--sorted by clicks).

Query details

You can query data grouped by page or property.

Grouped by page

For accurate counts, you must omit the page and query dimensions, like this:

"startDate": "2018-06-01",
"endDate": "2018-06-01",
"dimensions": ["country", "device"],
"type": "web",
"aggregationType": "byPage"

startDate / endDate: Choose a one-day window by selecting the same date.
dimensions: Optionally include country and/or device.
type: Enumerate over each type value as desired in a separate query.
aggregationType: Must be byPage.

For greater detail, including page and/or query information, at the expense of losing some data, run a query like this:

"startDate": "2018-06-01",
"endDate": "2018-06-01",
"dimensions": ["page", "query", "country", "device"],
"type": "web"

startDate / endDate: Choose a one-day window by selecting the same date.
dimensions: Include page. Optionally include any combination of query, country, or device.
type: Enumerate over each type value as desired in a separate query.

Grouped by property

For accurate counts, you must omit the page and query dimensions, like this:

"startDate": "2018-06-01",
"endDate": "2018-06-01",
"dimensions": ["country", "device"],
"type": "web"

startDate / endDate: Choose a one-day window by selecting the same date.
dimensions: Optionally include country and/or device.
type: Optionally enumerate over each type value as desired in a separate query.

For greater detail, including query, country, and/or device information, at the expense of losing some data, run a query like this:

"startDate": "2018-06-01",
"endDate": "2018-06-01",
"dimensions": ["query", "country", "device"],
"type": "web"

startDate / endDate: Choose a one-day window by selecting the same date.
dimensions: Optionally include any combination of query, country, or device.
type: Enumerate over each type value as desired in a separate query.

Grouping results by page or property

Impressions, clicks, position, and click-through-rate are are calculated differently when grouping results by page rather than by property. Learn more.

Why do I lose data when asking for more detail?

When you group by page and/or query, our system may drop some data in order to be able to calculate results in a reasonable time using a reasonable amount of computing resources.

Getting search appearance data

Search appearance is not available as a column along with any other dimensions. Therefore, if you want to see search appearance information for your site, you must follow this process:

Specify searchAppearance as the only dimension, which will group all data by search appearance type with no other dimensions.
Optionally run a second query, filtering by one of the search appearance types listed in step 1, adding any desired dimensions to the query (page, country, query, etc).

To retrieve data about multiple search appearance types, you must run the second step once per search appearance type listed step 1.

First query:

Get list of search appearance types on your site.

{
  "startDate": "2018-05-01",
  "endDate": "2018-05-31",
  "type": "web",
  "dimensions": [
    "searchAppearance"
  ]
}

Results:

Your site has type INSTANT_APP, AMP_BLUE_LINK, and so on.

 "rows": [
  {
   "keys": [
    "INSTANT_APP"
   ],
   "clicks": 443024.0,
   "impressions": 4109826.0,
   "ctr": 0.10779629113251997,
   "position": 1.088168452873674
  },
  {
   "keys": [
    "AMP_BLUE_LINK"
   ],
   "clicks": 429887.0,
   "impressions": 1.7090884E7,
   "ctr": 0.025152999692701676,
   "position": 7.313451603790653
  },...

Second query:

Filter by one of the search appearance types found in step 1, along with any dimensions that you like (page, device, etc). Here we filter by AMP_BLUE_LINK.

{
  "startDate": "2018-05-01",
  "endDate": "2018-05-31",
  "type": "web",
  "dimensions": [
    "device" // and/or page, country, ...
  ],
  "dimensionFilterGroups": [
    {
      "filters": [
        {
          "dimension": "searchAppearance",
          "operator": "equals",
          "expression": "AMP_BLUE_LINK"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}