On Monday, Google announced two reports to help marketers understand video performance in Google search and fix any problems the media might have displaying search results. 

The reports, which serve up in the Google Search Console, support research Google released in August. It shows several ways shoppers use online video in stores.

The two reports support online video in search, so it’s interesting to note Zenith’s revised ad spend growth forecast released today. Search remains one of only three types of media still expected to take additional ad spend from now through 2021.

Internet display leads with 30.1%, compared with 23.6% in 2018. Search came in at No. 2 with 18.2% and 16.3%, followed by Cinema at No. 3, with 0.9% and 0.7%, respectively.

Google’s data analyzes responses from more than 24,000 people in 10 countries. It also includes in-person interviews with 125 of them.

The research found 55% of respondents use video while in the store. More than 50% say videos help them decide the brand or product to buy, providing confidence not only to make a purchase, but helps with how to “talk to a mechanic” or “demystify complex products or topics.”

One of the two reports released today, Video Enhancement, aims to help search engines understand when videos appear on a page. Developers and marketers must use structured data to annotate videos.

The data from the report helps identify accurate information about the videos, like duration, upload date and other metadata. It also provides data for previews. The data helps searchers better understand what they’ll find in the video before they click.

The data in the “report allows you to see any errors and warnings for markup implemented on your site,” wrote Danielle Marshak, Google product manager, in a post. “When you fix an issue, you can use the report to validate if it was resolved by re-crawling your affected pages.”

The second report, Video Appearances in Performance, lets marketers see video-only clicks and impressions. Content serves up in this report when using VideoObject structured data, such as a description of thumbnail URL, or if Google uses other signals when identifying a video on the page.

Google said: “Performance reports already include an option to see the performance of your video tab search results (type = video). We are excited to share that we’ve extended our support for videos, so you can now also see the performance of your videos in the main Search results tab (type = web) and in Discover using the new ‘Videos’ appearance.”