In the Age of AI, Gain More Insights into Your Brand with Google
The old search system was easy to track. A URL ranks, gets an impression, gets a click, and belongs to a domain. Clean tracking. An AI-generated result doesn’t keep track of things that way. A brand exists across multiple domains simultaneously: in reviews, forums, media reports, on manufacturer and retailer sites, and on social media.
Google, with its Search Console (GSC), will also track your social media posts going forward. BUT YOU HAVE TO SET SOMETHING UP FOR THAT! Search Console has been the go-to tool for tracking your website’s performance in Google Search. Now Google is introducing a new property type: platform properties. This lets you see how your posts on Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube perform in Google Search and Discover. To set this up, create a separate property, select one of the four platforms, and verify the connection. After that, you’ll get:
- Performance report: Clicks, impressions, top posts, and search queries—exportable or, better yet, viewable in an Oplayo dashboard.
- Insights report: Traffic trends and how users find your account.
- Achievements: Milestones, such as when you reach a new threshold of clicks in 28 days.
This isn’t available everywhere yet. Google is rolling it out gradually over the coming weeks, initially only for a subset of users.
It sounds like a handy analytics feature. But it’s actually a major step.
Until now, the rule was: If you wanted to appear in Search Console, you needed your own website. That very barrier is now being removed. Google is also bringing creators without their own domain directly into its own measurement system. This shifts the very meaning of “search performance”—away from:
- How is my website performing on Google?
- To: How is my entire presence on Google performing, across all platforms?
This is useful for many. Those building reach via YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or X are getting, for the first time, a consolidated view of how Google displays this content.
The timing is more than striking. AI Search is keeping more and more users right on the search results page. Traditional clicks to a creator’s own website are declining, and in Search Console, this channel could look weaker month after month. Right now, Google is opening up a new, growing metric right alongside it: reach via social media and video. These new metrics have no historical data. They start at zero and almost inevitably show growth, while the channel with a long history shrinks. The overall narrative remains the same: Google brings you traffic. But Google is now tracking the source differently, making comparisons to the past more difficult.
For SEOs, there’s a catch. On your own website, you can influence almost everything: structure, content, and technology. But you have almost no control over how a TikTok or Instagram URL appears in Google. The platform sets the framework; Google handles the display. So you gain insights into a channel that you can almost only observe but can hardly optimize.
For SEOs and publishers, this raises an increasingly important question: What is the value of a metric that I can measure but can hardly influence anymore?
Here are the steps you need to take now!
Here's how to add a platform property to your account:
- Make sure you’re signed in to GSC with the Google account that owns your domain!
- Open the Search Console website.
- Go to the Search Console verification page, or open the property selection dropdown menu anywhere in Search Console and click “Add property.”
- Select one of the four (currently) available platforms: Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube.
- Follow the verification steps displayed on the screen to securely authorize the connection—you’ll also need access to Instagram and the other platforms for this.
This is what it should look like in your GSC
Once all your social media accounts have been added, your existing social media accounts should appear next to the domain (here: oplayo.com).
The linked social media accounts in the Oplayo Dashboard
The difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional thinks about measurement in advance and plans it out from start to finish. That’s why you should add social media accounts as soon as possible.
Note: You can only add this data via the Oplayo Dashboard—not via any Looker Studio dashboards we may have created previously.
In the Oplayo Dashboard, you should be able to see what the conversion rate is and how much you pay per lead (CpL). This is especially important if you want to accurately track different channels. Questions such as:
- How many leads do we need to reach our quarterly goal?
- Is there a specific phase during which leads are (frequently) not processed?
- How did the initial contact come about, and through which channel was a lead inquiry or purchase completed?
From Lead to Customer
It often takes a long time for a lead to contribute to ROI. Typically, a buyer needs 7 points of contact before making a purchase. On average, 50% of leads aren’t ready to buy, so this shouldn’t be underestimated. That’s why it’s all the more important to track every interaction with the company. Even acquisition campaigns that generate few leads can be extremely successful simply because they increase brand awareness or retain existing leads. In the past, marketers usually measured only the FT (First Touch) of their campaigns or, for example, the “Last Click” in Google Ads. The problem: a lead can turn into an opportunity after the FT from a different campaign, but the original campaign is usually credited. This is only useful when it comes to generating leads for the database and sales cycles are very short. However, if sales cycles are longer (e.g., in B2B) and the focus is also on nurturing leads and their readiness to buy, leads should be attributed based on MT (Multi-Touch). This way, the attribution is split across multiple campaigns. Example: A lead visits your website, fills out a form, and downloads an e-book on analytics. The lead is now in the database, and you know they’re interested in analytics. You also have their contact information. Now you can, for example, send an invitation to an analytics webinar to their email. They then attend the webinar, after which you send them a discount code for an upcoming trade show and a recording of the webinar. The lead is interested and is engaging with your content. At the trade show, a sales representative follows up with the lead, and ultimately, a purchase is made.
