What Google Search Console’s latest update actually means

Google is now allowing advertisers to measure social content in Search Console… But what does this actually mean and is part of the measurement missing?

Google Search Console now allow you to report on content that lives on platforms you don’t own across socials, pretty huge right? Expect this rollout to come to you over the next few weeks as it rolls out globally.  

For years we’ve been speaking about it, the importance of social on search as consumer behaviour is changing, so is the way they interact with brands. In 2023 I ended up speaking at YMS about the impact of social on ecom and have been an advocate of social search for years.

This change is such a refreshing update to see and postures that more change is to come as Google start taking non-traditional search more seriously, and the measurement of it.

Well let’s get into it…

Google have finally given us advertisers the means to measure social in Google Search Console but it still leaves a large part of social visibility off the table.

Looking at this from a pure measurement angle, this update exposes two shifts in how we look at data:

The Organic Social attribution leak: For years, if a user found your TikTok video or Instagram Reel via Google Search, clicked it, and eventually converted on your site, your analytics platform likely credited that win to Organic Social or Direct. In reality, it was an SEO acquisition. This update proves our social teams have been accidentally winning at SEO for years without getting the attribution credit for it.

The multi-platform SERP estate metric: Historically, marketers only tracked keyword rankings for their domain. Measurement is now shifting to total SERP Dominance. If a brand can rank top with their website, third with their YouTube video, and fifth with their TikTok for the same high-intent query, they own the entire board. This update finally gives us a way to track the collective CTR of the entire digital search footprint, not just our website.

So what is this update?

The feature announced is called platform properties. You can connect Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube account and Search Console to show you how they perform in Google Search and Discover.

Essentially, it allows you to surface queries, how many impressions and clicks they generate, and which posts are pulling the most traffic from your social accounts. The interesting bit is, it works even if you don’t have a website at all showing an interesting new view from Google being less website centric.

The two main sections to get your teeth stuck into are:

• The Performance report: It displays total clicks, impressions, and other standard metrics you’d expect to see, allowing users to filter to identify what posts and queries generate the most traffic. This is also exportable for us nerds that love to play around with our data outside of platforms.
• The Insights report:  It allows you to see an overview of traffic patterns, successful posts and the ways people find you on Google.

Most of what Google has put out frames this as a creator feature. A pretty huge free reporting upgrade for people who live on socials rather than on a specific domain.

To be honest, I think this undersells it. From a measurement perspective, this shows Google is acknowledging something the data has been telling us for years and it’s worth being precise about both what this new visibility gives you and what it doesn’t.

Social content is search inventory

Since I’ve been an adult (I’m 32 now, cries in Millennial), social and search have been separate lines on a report, separate teams, separate KPIs and separate agencies in plenty of cases. Social gets judged on engagement and reach whilst its much more mature sibling gets judged on traffic and conversions.

But this has never been the case, behaviour of users is very much everywhere and people aren’t die hard search or social, they’re both. Users discover brands through TikTok, check review on Google, and convert wherever friction is lowest, making the cohesion in journey somewhat messy.

Until now, that entire journey was partially invisible to brands and advertisers, using attribution to try stitch together the journey with cello tape. You could see your search performance in GSC and your social performance in each platform’s native analytics. But they overlap and always have, social content being discovered through search sat in a gap between the two for a long time. As advertisers and marketers it’s always fallen into ‘this sort of looks like it’s happening’ without proper measurement to see how the intermingle.

This new update genuinely closes the gap a little more but not completely. It’s a win for everyone and I do believe it’s a step in the right direction. Having query level data to understand how people find social content through Google is a great step forward.

But new data always arrives with a sales pitch attached, implicit or otherwise. So before anyone builds a strategy slide around this, it’s worth asking the question we should ask of every data source, what kind of evidence is this?

Let’s talk evidence

I find it useful to place any measurement input on two dimensions.

The first is evidence strength. At one end sits attribution, the observed, correlational data, normally reported by the platform whose value is being assessed. At the other sits incrementality, a very tried and tested means with causal evidence of what your activity actually changed.

Attribution tells you what happened whilst incrementality tells you what you caused showing contribution. They are not the same thing, and most measurement mistakes come from not using both or treating them as similar when they’re not.

Incrementality and contribution show the role the channel plays, whilst attribution is more tactical and day to day. In a collective search view of the world, some activity creates demand, building visibility before anyone types your brand name (e.g. Social) but on the other hand some activity captures demand that already exists (e.g. Search). We often find people Judging demand creation activity using demand capture metrics and it’s how we see Brands devalue social and other non-direct channels.

If we look at the new update to Search Console, it plots both angles and it lands very clearly in one place, it shows the demand side value but shows the impact on demand capture. It’s pretty huge.

It allows us to trace impressions and discovery queries for social content as a visibility signal. This new update allows us to understand more about the moment before someone knows you, how your content surfaces when people are searching around a topic, not just for your brand name or ad on Google.

This is a nod from Google to tell you how much value Google delivers to your social content.

But the import part, impressions and clicks describe visibility, not impact. Knowing your TikTok ranks for a category query tells you nothing about what happens if that content stops existing. It doesn’t tell you whether that visibility drives incremental demand or simply intercepts people who would have found you anyway. That question is the only question a budget holder ultimately cares about and cannot be answered by this data, or by any attribution data for that matter.

What I’d actually do with it

This new update is useful but only for a specific purpose, to get a steer and generate hypotheses on the demand side of the search system from social and video.

I’ll be using this update to…

• Map which social content pulls search impressions:
  This is demand creation we weren’t crediting fully. If certain formats or topics consistently surface in Search and Discover, that’s a signal about what’s building visibility beyond the platform’s own feed and a prompt to look at whether your content strategy is accidentally or deliberately feeding your search presence.
• Compare the queries surfacing your social content against those surfacing your website:
  In my experience these will differ, social content tends to win on informational and inspirational queries but websites win on brand and transactional ones. This update will help you understand the demand vs capture split in your query data and where it came from and where it’s going.
• Feed it into share of search tracking as an early demand indicator:
  Share of search is one of the better leading indicators of brand health we have. Social content’s search visibility is an extension of that picture and something we’ve not had visibility of in Google core products before.
• Test what the signal suggests:
  If platform properties tell you a content strand is driving meaningful search discovery, that’s a hypothesis.

This helps inform testing, it could be a geo-based test, a content pause, a deliberate up-weight in others. These are the mechanisms that turn “this content is visible” into “this content is incremental”. I see this update as another means in my arsenal of what we should test and how we can drive further incrementality.

New visibility, but the same rules

There’s a pattern to how new measurement features get adopted, and it seldom goes well.

When a platform releases new data, the data is genuinely interesting so we treat it like insight. It appears on a dashboard and in time it’s justifying budget but no one asked for the evidence to why outside of what it says.

But this update shows the underlying shift that social has as real and is genuinely useful. Search has long been fragmented and discovery happens across surfaces that brands don’t own, and measurement that pretends otherwise is measuring a world that no longer exists.

Google building social content into Search Console is an honest reflection of how people actually behave and for anyone building a total view of search, it’s a welcome new input.

Just remember which corner of the map it sits in. This is platform-reported visibility data on the demand side of the system.

The proving is still done the same way it always was, with incrementality testing validating what the observed data suggests, and MMM putting it in the context of everything else you’re doing.

It’s another data point in the measurement triangle in the attribution corner, not a new source of truth.