Search Console gets new Reports for Special Announcements

Last month, Google introduced a new way for site owners to highlight COVID-19 announcements on Google Search.

Sites that wanted to make a coronavirus-related announcement had two options. They could either add “SpecialAnnouncement” structured data to their webpages or submit a COVID-19 announcement in the Search Console.

Google stated that the new feature was only available to health and government agency sites. That way, essential updates like school closures or stay-at-home directives can appear directly on Google Search.

At the time, the tech giant also promised to develop the feature further, and maybe expand it to include more sites. Now, Google is making good on one of its promises.

In a post on Google Webmaster Central Blog, executives from the company wrote:

“Today, we are announcing support for SpecialAnnouncement in Google Search Console, including new reports to help you find any issues with your implementation and monitor how this rich result type is performing.”

Here’s what you should know about the new reports on Search Console.

Special Announcement Enhancement Report

Site owners that have implemented “SpecialAnnouncement” structured data can now access this new report on Search Console. Thanks to the Enhancement reports, you can now identify errors, warnings as well as valid implementations.

Also, site owners can use the report to validate fixed issues on their website. In turn, it’ll trigger a process where the search engine recrawls the affected page.

Special Announcements in Performance Report

This report provides details on the performance of your SpecialAnnouncement marked-up pages on Google Search.

That means you can track clicks, impressions as well as the CTR results of your special announcement pages on the Performance report. With this report, you’ll understand how the pages are trending for any of the available dimensions.

Special Announcements in Rich Results

Finally, Google’s Rich Results Test Tools now support special announcement structured data.

After adding SpecialAnnouncement structured data to your page, you can use the tool to test the markup. Even if you’re yet to publish the markup on your site, you can still upload a piece of code for testing.

“These new tools should make it easier to understand how your marked-up SpecialAnnouncement pages perform on Search and to identify and fix issues,” says Google.