Measuring What Matters In Google

What is Google business insights?

Insights give you an inside look at how people find your business listing on the web. Because many customers find businesses on Google Search and Maps, Insights focuses on how customers use Search and Maps to find your listing, and what they do once they find it. 

Google Business Profile Insights show you data related to your local search performance such as the number of views your listing has received, how search users find you, and the types of interaction they have with your listing (clicking calling you or requesting directions for example). As GBP insights are focused entirely on your local search presence, it differs from Search Console and Google Analytics.

What Insights does a Google report provide?

Available performance metrics – In the business performance report, you can monitor specific profile interactions such as:

• Searches: The queries people used to find your business. The Searches metric is updated at the beginning of each month. Updates may take 5 days to show up. Search queries display whenever your Business Profile shows up for a particular query. You cannot directly manage queries. Learn how to improve ranking.
• Users who viewed your profile: Number of unique visitors to your profile. A user can be counted a limited number of times if they visit your Business Profile on multiple devices and platforms such as desktop or mobile and Google Maps or Google Search. Per breakdown device and platform, a user can only be counted once a day. Multiple daily visits aren’t counted. Since this metric represents the number of unique users, it may be lower than the number of views you find on your Business Profile and in email notifications. Since the metric focuses on views of the Business Profile, as opposed to overall views of the Business on Google, it may also be lower than the number of views you find on your Business Profile and in email notifications.
• Direction requests: Number of unique customers who request directions to your business. We changed how we tally unique direction requests to account for things like multi-tapping, direction request cancellation, and spam. We expect the new direction requests metric to more accurately represent the number of times individual customers request directions to your business. We’re still experimenting with the new version of the metric, so the old one is still available on the Business Profile Insights page.
• Calls: Number of clicks on the call button on your Business Profile. Provide your phone number to start tracking this metric.
• Website clicks: Number of clicks on the website link on your Business Profile.
• Messages: Number of unique conversations through messages.
• Bookings: Number of completed bookings by customers. To get data for this metric, you need to set up bookings through a provider.
• Total interactions: A summary of all your total interactions.

Google is currently transitioning Insights to Business Profile Reporting, which will see more metrics associated with your Business Profile in the coming months. New reports and functionality will also be added. 

How customers find your Business Profile

This section of Insights shows how many customers found you and how they found you. Click or tap the chart on the dashboard to see the percentage of all customers that found you via each of these methods:

• Direct searches: A customer directly searched for your business name or address.
• Discovery searches: A customer searched for a category, product, or service that you offer, and your listing appeared.
• Branded searches: A customer searched for your brand or a brand related to your business. This category will only appear if your listing has appeared at least once for a branded search.
• Total searches: The total number of direct, discovery, and branded searches.

Tip: The search graph shows you the number of people who searched for your business by name or by category. These searches are calculated individually, so if a user did a discovery search and then a direct search, it would count these as 2 searches (or one in each section). 

Customer Actions

If you’re unsure where you should be focusing your GBP efforts, the Customer actions data should help you determine what to do next. It can help you determine what kinds of actions a searcher commonly takes on your listing—for example, requesting directions or calling you.

Lots of direction requests could mean creating a post sharing nearby parking spots or adding public transport details.

When managing your profile directly in Search, the Business Performance Report breaks down each type of action into its own report so you can see calls, messages, bookings, directions, and website clicks data individually.

Next Lesson: Meta – Facebook & Instgram Business Pages