Track Your Social Videos in Google Search Console
If you're a marketer, brand manager, or business owner creating videos for your brand's social media channels, Google Search Console just dropped an update you’ll want to get familiar with.
There's a lot more data available to you this month than there was last month.
Three weeks after Google announced that we'd be able to track the performance of social media videos in Search Console, the feature they’re dubbing “Platform Properties” was pushed out to everyone.
For the first time in history, Search Console is now reporting on content that you publish off of your own site, which for marketers, is pretty useful.
What channels can you track in search?
Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube accounts all link within Search Console now, so you can see what Google queries and search results directed people to your posts. Videos have become more and more featured in search results and AI overviews over the years, in particular for Google's owned YouTube channel (no surprise there), and this will give marketers a really good look at what specific videos are being featured.
How you can work with the data
Here are the six most prominent ways that marketers are working with platform properties to help their clients make use of the data.
1. Topic generation
Search Console is pulling together queries that are similar and grouping them together into what they’re calling Query Groups (sexy). The group will be named after the best-performing query within that group. When put together, this allows you to compare query groups against each other and helps inform you on which video topics are performing best for your brand on search. Double down on what's working, or change things up for a slower campaign.
2. Check the impact of fresh content
In the past, Search Console data had a delay of several days, which made it almost useless for reviewing anything that was time-sensitive. With social posts, things happen quickly, and this needed to be addressed. Google says that they've cut the average delay in almost half and that their new ’24-hour view’ shows data from the last day with only a few hours of lag. That's pretty cool. It means that marketers can check for the impact of fresh content in search almost immediately, spot trending queries quickly when they do spike, or flag any early technical issues.
3. Compare across platforms in one place
Platform properties will allow marketers to export data from YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok, all side by side with each other in a spreadsheet, making it really easy to see and compare how your content is performing in search.
4. See what has staying power
You'll now be able to check Search Console to see which of your videos and posts (that may have been posted months or even years ago) continue to perform well in search. You can then use this data to inform strategy around whether you should pin a post to your profile or expand on a video with a part two. It all helps inform where you display your content and whether you should do follow-ups with it.
5. Annotate and monitor changes
Every brand posting on YouTube should be experimenting with different titles and captions to see if anything performs better or ranks higher in search. One of the ways you can use platform properties is to annotate the date that you made a switch and see whether or not performance changed afterwards.
6. Long-form vs. short-form data comparisons
The new comparison mode in Platform Properties allows marketers to view different data sets side by side. We can now look at long-form and short-form content together. Think comparing full-length long-form YouTube videos against YouTube Shorts or Instagram posts compared to Instagram Reels. See what's performing best and put more of your eggs into that basket.
Search terms help inform content
Put it all together, and there's one major story here: Being able to see what search terms led to video views and clicks allows you to adjust your content strategy. It gives you the full picture as a marketer of what you need to do to keep a brand in the spotlight on Google Search, providing you with more data that can be turned into actionable tasks.
Add your profiles in Search Console today and start playing around. It’s great data for helping determine your next video topic.