👀 Social Just Got A Search Report Card
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Platform properties are live in Search Console. Your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube content now has clicks, impressions and queries attached to it.
Google Search Console has a new property type - platform properties, that lets you connect Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube accounts directly. No website required.
You add the property, authorise the connection, and you get reporting on how that account's content performs in Google Search and Discover.
📈 Performance report - clicks, impressions, CTR, average position and the actual queries people used
💡 Insights report - traffic trends, top-performing posts, how people are finding your account
🏆 Achievements - milestones like passing a clicks threshold over the last 28 days
🚫 Facebook and LinkedIn aren't supported - It's four platforms only, for now
⏳ Gradual rollout - the option may not be in your account yet
"It did well on the platform" now becomes "it got found on Google."
A Reel about your new bottomless brunch that surfaces when someone searches your city and the word brunch is a fundamentally different asset to one that entertained the followers you already had.
That's the paid-versus-organic budget conversation reframed in one metric. It's also a second axis for judging creator partnerships - did their content earn search visibility, or just views?
One honest caveat, this reports how your social content performs on Google. It is not a full attribution model and it won't tell you a TikTok made someone book a table. What it gives you is the half of the picture that was previously invisible - plus a decent proxy for whether that content is feeding AI Overviews too.
It needs a few months of data before it says anything useful. Which is precisely the argument for connecting your accounts this week rather than in October.
Connect now. Argue with the data later.
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📤 France Has Killed The Open Rate. Italy's Next.
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The CNIL now treats the email tracking pixel like a cookie - and the compliance deadline passed a fortnight ago.
On 14 April, France's data authority published Délibération n° 2026-042, its first formal recommendation dedicated to tracking pixels in email.
The finding: a pixel that reports when someone opens an email is functionally equivalent to a cookie, so it needs prior, explicit consent - separate from consent to receive the email at all.
The email is still legal. The silent tracking is not.
Existing contacts had until 14 July to be informed and given a genuine chance to object. That date has now passed, and the CNIL said it would begin checking compliance once it did. Italy's Garante applies an equivalent regime in late October.
The exemptions are narrow. Pixels used purely for security or authentication are fine, as is open tracking used strictly for deliverability - adjusting send frequency, suppressing addresses that have gone dark.
Measuring campaign performance, building interest profiles, powering automation triggers? Consent required.
And there's an obvious trap that a lot of teams are about to walk into. A bulk re-permission campaign fires its own pixel before the recipient has had any chance to answer, which means it fails on its own terms. Consent has to come before the first email lands.
🔕 Switch off non-exempt open and click tracking for French contacts now - Italian ones before late October
📝 Collect tracking consent at the sign-up form, not inside an email
🔗 Add a tracking opt-out link that's separate from your unsubscribe link
🔄 Rebuild open-based automation triggers around clicks, replies and bookings
📊 Report on clicks, bookings, covers and revenue instead
Why UK operators should care about a French ruling: if you're a group with European sites, or a London restaurant sitting on a database full of international guests, you already have contacts in scope. And this is the direction of travel rather than an outlier - the ePrivacy logic that got us here applies just as neatly across the rest of the EU.
Frankly, this is no great loss. Apple broke the reliability of the open rate back in 2021 with Mail Privacy Protection. The CNIL has just finished the job on a metric that's been quietly lying to CRM teams for five years.
Measure what a guest does, not whether their inbox loaded an image.
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🎯 ChatGPT Ads Grew Up This Month
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oCPC bidding, averaged budgets, geo exclusions and a bulk API. It's starting to behave like an actual ad platform.
In the past fortnight, OpenAI has shipped the features that separate an experiment from a channel:
🎯 Conversions objective (oCPC) - optimises delivery toward clicks likely to convert, still billed on valid clicks so not true conversion campaign just yet
📅 Average daily budgets - fixed daily caps become a rolling seven-day average
⏱️ Spend pacing - budgets now distributed more evenly across the day
📍 Geo exclusion - cut specific locations out of targeting entirely
🔐 Automatic advanced matching - hashed customer data to attribute more web conversions
⚙️ Bulk API - create and update campaigns, ad groups and ads asynchronously
⭐ Refreshed product cards - now carrying price and star ratings
Two of those matter disproportionately if you're running venues.
Worth knowing before you get excited: ads only serve to Free and Go users, targeting is contextual rather than keyword-based, and UK personalisation requires explicit user consent - so a meaningful share of your delivery will be contextual only.
It's still early. Inventory, reporting and benchmarks are all immature, and nobody has credible sector benchmarks yet. But it's a channel now, not a science project.
Test it small, learn it early. Hold tight for Claude to follow suit.
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🎤 We're Hosting The Giant Panel at Team Marketing
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15 October, Big Penny Social. we're hosting seven hospitality marketers on one stage to talk about winning the 2027 guest.
Team Marketing: The Big One returns on Thursday 15 October at Big Penny Social in Walthamstow. A full day, over 200 hospitality marketers, in-house, agency-side and freelance.
We're proud to be sponsoring it - and at 2.45pm, we're hosting Winning The 2027 Guest, a giant panel spanning just about every corner of the sector:
🍸 Jen Wragg - Sales & Marketing Director, The Alchemist
🏨 Jonathan Lloyd - Commercial Director, Inn Collection Group
🛎️ Marc Saunders - Director of Marketing for Hotels, Dominus
🏬 Sam Hawker - Head of Digital Marketing, Boxpark
🥙 Natasha Naik - Head of Marketing, Comptoir Group
🍣 Catherine Wells - Senior Marketing Manager, SushiDog
🎤 Ruth Chan - Head of Marketing & Partnerships, BAM Karaoke Box
Seven brands, seven completely different guest journeys, one question: what are you actually doing to win the guest next year?
The rest of the day earns the ticket on its own. Kirsty Hulse opens on practical optimism, Airship's Dan Brookman is on MC duty, and Arc Inspirations' Martin Wolstencroft and Laura Lewis do a warts-and-all fireside on the founder–marketer relationship. Two rounds of workshops, lunch, and an after-party upstairs at Flukes with a DJ set from Ronnie Joice.
It's the event of the year, with even more sessions to be announced. We're stoked for this one.
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