In early July, Google announced new platform properties for Search Console, allowing anyone to track how their social and video posts on Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube perform on Google Search, Discover and Google News. These new capabilities are now available to everyone globally.
This is great news for small businesses, who can now connect supported social accounts directly to Search Console and measure how their posts are being discovered outside the social platforms themselves.
Thomas Phillips, Founder of DTC SEO Agency, said in a post that the update closes one of the biggest measurement gaps in cross-platform marketing.
“For years, brands have known that their TikToks, Reels and YouTube videos can appear in Google, but they have had very little visibility over which posts were appearing, what people searched for and whether anybody actually clicked. That blind spot has now started to disappear,” he stated. “Social teams have traditionally measured success through views, likes and engagement inside each app. Google is now giving brands a completely different data set, showing whether that same content continues to attract attention when somebody searches for a product, question or topic days or even months later.”
New Capabilities for Small Businesses
Google’s new Platform Properties currently supports Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts. Once an account has been verified, brands can access data including:
- Total clicks from Google
- Search impressions
- Average click-through rate
- Average position in Search
- The individual posts driving traffic
- The search queries people use to discover the content
- Traffic trends across Google Search, Discover and Google News
- Top-performing and recently growing content
Google said in a statement that Discover and Google News reports will only appear where the connected content has received traffic from those surfaces. It may also take several days for data to begin appearing after an account is connected.
The reporting does not replace the analytics supplied by each social network. Instead, it measures how the content performs across Google’s own products.
“This could completely change which posts businesses choose to recreate, update, pin or turn into longer website content,” Phillips said in a statement. “A TikTok might have modest engagement inside TikTok but continue appearing for valuable searches on Google. Equally, a Reel that performed brilliantly on Instagram might generate almost no visibility in Search. Until now, many brands would never have known the difference.”
Google’s Guide to Analyzing Content Performance
Along with the announcement of the new Platform Properties, Google published a guide on how to analyze your social and video content performance. Whether you’re a content creator, social media manager or SEO professional, this guide will show you what insights are available from Search Console and how to analyze your performance.
The guide covers:
- Compare formats: For example, you could apply page filters or comparison mode to evaluate the performance of your video playlists, or contrast the search traffic of short-form versus full-length videos.
- Understand your Search audience: Use the Insights report to identify the top, trending up and trending down query groups sending traffic from Google Search to your social and video content.
- Spot trending content: Use the 24-hour filter to identify sudden traffic spikes from Google Search to your recent posts, enabling you to cross-promote the trending content on other platforms.
- Analyze across platforms: Export performance data from multiple properties into a single spreadsheet to compare how your content performs side-by-side on YouTube, Instagram, X or TikTok.
- Optimize existing content: Use Search Console to guide your strategy with data by identifying older videos that are regaining search traction, indicating which posts you might want to pin to your social or video feed or expand into a part two. Additionally, you can use Search Console annotations to track whether external updates, like rewriting a YouTube title or TikTok caption, affect your search performance over time.
“This is not simply another analytics dashboard for marketers to glance at once a month,” Phillips noted in the statement. “It gives brands the opportunity to identify which social posts Google considers useful, which customer searches those posts are answering and where valuable content is already gaining visibility without a dedicated web page. Every business publishing regularly on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or X should connect its accounts this week. The first report could expose successful content the marketing team did not even realize it had.”
