How To Measure Your Google Business Profile Success

In general terms, if you can’t measure a marketing activity then you shouldn’t be doing it. Without the ability to measure success you have no way to know if you’re improving or helping your business. The good news is that Google understands the importance of tracking and measurement, so they’ve built some simple analytics right into the Google Business Profile console. So, from Google My Business to Google Business Profile, how can you stand out on Google with a free business profile? Let’s go for a tour of what insights are available within Google Business Profile at the time of this writing.

How To Find Your Google Business Profile Insights

From your Google Business Profile login, sign in to your account. On the left-hand menu you’ll see ‘Insights’, click on this.

Two Types of Insights Reports: 

Along with the original Google Business Profile Insights reports, Google just recently launched new Profile Performance reports. You’ll see a link to this at the top of your Insights tab.

1. Profile Performance:  This new reporting function provides the ability to see how your profile has performed based on the following criteria:  1) Overview 2) Calls 3) Messages or 4) Bookings. 
   
   This is really helpful to understand what actions searchers have taken. Scroll down this report and you’ll also find valuable information related to how many people viewed your profile and the breakdown of device types they were using. 
   
   It also displays how many keywords were used to find your profile and what the top keywords were. This is very helpful from an SEO standpoint and also so you can further optimize your GMB profile by incorporating more of the higher searched-for terms.
2. The Original Google Business Profile Insights:  These insights are still available and still valuable. The reports you find under this section are:

1. How People Search for Your Business: Provides a breakdown of Direct (those searching for your business by name or address), Discovery (those searching for category, product or service), or Branded (those searching for a brand related to your business).
   
2. Where Customers View Your Business on Google (on Search or on Google Maps):  Did they find and view your profile on Google Search or Google Maps?
   
3. Customer Actions: How many took specific actions after finding your listing — i.e. visited website, requested directions to your location, or called you?
   
   
4. Direction Requests: If they asked for directions, where were these searchers from?
   
   
5. Phone Calls and Popular Times: What day of the week and what time of the day did calls happen? Super helpful for staffing up at the right days and times of the week.

6. Photo Views and Photo Quantity:  Check out these numbers, it’s pretty amazing how often people are searching for photos that you might provide. The other great thing about this report is it shows how your profile compares to other businesses like yours. If another business is sharing more images they are most likely getting preferential treatment from Google. Use this information to beat the competition.
   

How To Use The Reports To Monitor And Optimize Your Profile:

1. You can use the various reports to create a sense of flow:  i.e. someone has to search to find you on either Maps or Google —> they use particular keywords to do so —> they then take an action. As a business you want to determine if each of these steps is increasing or decreasing.
2. Tracking changes over time in visitors, searches, actions, photos, direction requests, etc.:  this is a great high-level way to know if your efforts are working. 
   

Tips For Leveraging Google Business Profile Reports

1. Keep copies of your reports to refer to:  Google only shares the last quarter, month or week (with the exception of the new reporting which can go back 6 months), so to really understand the long-term success of your Google Business Profile efforts you should ensure you print or take a screenshot of the information so you can refer to it later on.
2. Turn on functions to see data:  If you haven’t turned on Messages or Bookings in your profile then you can’t track it.
3. Remember seasonality:  We often want to see continuous increasing of numbers, but the truth is most businesses experience seasonal fluctuations. Remember this when comparing your results from month to month.

Mastering Google Business Profile has never been more important to ensure people searching for businesses like yours can find you. If you’d like help navigating this crucial piece of marketing, contact Ian at Outsourced Marketing… he loves to help small business owners thrive.