New reports for Special Announcements in Search Console

Last month we introduced a new way for sites to highlight COVID-19 announcements on Google Search. At first, we’re using this information to highlight announcements in Google Search from health and government agency sites, to cover important updates like school closures or stay-at-home directives.

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. In addition we now also support the markup on the Rich Results Test to review your existing URLs or debug your markup code before moving it to production.

Special Announcements Enhancement report

A new report is now available in Search Console for sites that have implemented SpecialAnnouncement structured data. The report allows you to see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site.

In addition, if you fix an issue, you can use the report to validate it, which will trigger a process where Google recrawls your affected pages. Learn more about the Rich result status reports.

Image: Special Announcements Enhancement report

Special Announcements appearance in Performance report

The Search Console Performance report now also allows you to see the performance of your SpecialAnnouncement marked-up pages on Google Search. This means that you can check the impressions, clicks and CTR results of your special announcement pages and check their performance to understand how they are trending for any of the dimensions available. Learn more about the Search appearance tab in the performance report.

Image: Special Announcements appearance in Performance report

Special Announcements in Rich Results Test

After adding SpecialAnnouncement structured data to your pages, you can test them using the Rich Results Test tool. If you haven’t published the markup on your site yet, you can also upload a piece of code to check the markup. The test shows any errors or suggestions for your structured data.

Image: Special Announcements in Rich Results Test

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

If you have any questions, check out the Google Webmasters community.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate & Moshe Samet, Search Console PM.