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Different visibility numbers in Google Looker Studio versus AWR. Why?
Different visibility numbers in Google Looker Studio versus AWR. Why?
Iulia Z. Lacriceanu avatar
Written by Iulia Z. Lacriceanu
Updated over a week ago

Sometimes, you may see different visibility values in a Google Looker Studio report than AWR shows for a project. This could be caused by the one of the following factors: 

1. Aggregation across the multiple dates

When looking at the Visibility report in AWR, the application shows the exact values that were calculated for the latest ranking update, compared with those calculated for the previous update. However, in GDS there may be set different aggregation types to compute values across the multiple dates. By default, Visibility percent, Average Rank and Click share are set to Average aggregation, while the others are set to Sum aggregation

Let's use a project with daily updates for this example, and look at the data from May 3 to April 4, 2019 for the Recipes group on allrecipes.com and Google Desktop Universal engine. 

Here are the Visibility evolution numbers in AWR:

The values are for the May 3 update, changes being computed by comparing the values from May 3 to those from April 4.

Now, here are the numbers in GDS, for the same input selection: 

These metrics in GDS are set to Average. The values are computed on the Looker Studio side, based on the data that AWR feeds for each of the daily updates within the selected time frame (May 3 - April 4, 2019 in our example).  

When looking at a metric set to Sum, like On first page, the value in the GDS report (1.4K) is much higher than the one shown in AWR (46). This happens because the value in AWR is calculated for a single update date (May 3), while the value in GDS is calculated as the sum of all On first page values recorded across the 30 updates available in the time interval.

If we change the aggregation type from sum to average in GDS: 

The value in our GDS report is recalculated as average across the 30 updates: 

2. Differences in keyword group matching

There are two cases that can cause these differences: 

  • When you assign a keyword to multiple keyword groups - its ranking position will be taken into account when computing the visibility stats for each of those groups

  • When some keywords are not assigned to any group - the positions of the not assigned keywords are not taken into account when computing the stats for the groups.

The values shown in GDS, when all groups are selected, will be different from those shown in AWR when All keywords is selected.

Let's look at an example for a single ranking update date in AWR: 

Comparing the values with those in the GDS report for the same date, the numbers do not match: 

The solution for these cases is to use All keywords as filter in GDS, instead of the multiple groups: 

Do you have any other questions? Don’t hesitate to get in touch and we will keep building the FAQ.

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