How to Use Google Business Profile Insights to Analyze Performance

A Google Business Profile (previously called Google My Business) is a free business listing on Google that helps customers find you on Google Search and Maps. Once you have a Google Business Profile set up for your business, the Google Business Profile Insights reports gives you valuable information about how people find your business profile on Google.

For more information on how to set up a Google Business Profile, read our blog post on How to Create and Optimize a Google Business Profile for Your Business.

What are Google Business Profile Insights?

Google Business Profile Insights are reports that are available to you in your Google Business Profile account. They provide information about how people find your business listing on Google Search and Maps and the actions they took after finding it i.e calls, messages, directions requests or website clicks.

What Information is Shown on Google Business Profile Insights?

Google Business Profile Insights provides information about both organic searches on Google as well as Google Ads.

This information includes:

1. How customers search for your business

This section of the Insights report shows how customers found your business profile on Google.

  • Direct searches: People who directly searched for your business name or address.
  • Discovery searches: People who searched for a product, service or category that you provide and your business listing was shown to them.
  • Branded searches: People who searched for your brand or a brand related to your business.
  • Total searches: The total number of the direct, discovery and branded searches that showed your business profile.

You can select to view the searches by week, month or quarter by using the dropdown above the graph.

Google Business Profile Insights Report - How Customers Search for Your Business

How Customers Search for Your Business

2. Where customers view your business on Google

This section of Insights shows the number of customers who found you on Google Search or Google Maps.

  • Listing on Search: The customers who found your listing on Google Search.
  • Listing on Maps: The number of customers who found your listing on Google Maps.
  • Total Views : The sum of the Search and Maps listings.

You can select to view the number of views by week, month or quarter using the dropdown above the Total Views.

Google My Business Insights - Views on Google Search or Maps

Where Customers View Your Business on Google

3. Customer Actions

This section of Insights shows the actions customers took after they found your Google Business Profile Listing.

  • Visit your website : The customer visited your website by clicking on the link from your Google Business Profile Listing.
  • Call You : The customer clicked on the “Call” Button on your business profile.
  • Message You: The customer sent you a message from your Google My Business profile.
  • Request Directions: The customer requested directions to your business location.
  • Total actions: The sum of all the actions above.

You can select to view customer actions taken by week, month or quarter with the dropdown above the graph.

4. Phone Calls

This section lists when and how many times customers called your business by clicking on the “Call” button on your Google Business Profile listing.

Note that if the user copies the phone number on the listing and dials it manually, the call will not be counted here.

You can view calls by Day of Week or Time of Day. You can also view the data for 1 week, 1 month or 1 quarter by using the dropdown menus.

5. Photos

This section of Insights gives you information about the photos loaded on your Google My Business listing and how often they have been viewed on Google.

  • Photo views: how often the photos on your Google Business Profile listing have been viewed. You can see the views for All Photos, Owner photos and Customer photos. You can also view the photo views by week, month or quarter.
  • Photo quantity: how many photos you have uploaded to your business listing.

New Business Profile Performance Metrics

In February 2021, Google added some new performance metrics to Google Business Profile Insights. These new metrics are available under See New Profile Performance in the top of the dashboard. Additional metrics are also expected to be added soon.

Data for your business profile is provided for the last 6 months. You can also track business performance by setting custom time periods. We found that the maximum time period allowed is 6 months.

The information available in the Profile Performance report includes:

  • Time period: Set the time period for the performance data you want to see.
  • Total Interactions: The total number of interactions with your Google Business Profile.
  • Searches: The total searches and the search queries used on Google that showed your business listing. Searches is shown under Overview. The searches metric is updated at the beginning of the month. Updates can take up to 5 days to show up.
  • People who viewed your business profile: The total number of unique visitors who viewed your Google My Business listing. The number of users is further broken down by platform such as Google Search or Google Maps; and by device such as desktop or mobile. Each user is counted once per day for each device and platform.
  • Calls: Calls made from the Call button on your business listing. This also lists missed calls.
  • Messages: Unique messages sent from your Google My Business profile.
  • Bookings: Bookings made from your business listing. To get this information, you need to set up bookings with a provider through Reserve with Google.
  • Directions: Number of individual customers who request directions to your business. This is the new directions metric and is expected to be more accurate than the old directions metric that is still available on the Insights page.
  • Website Clicks: Number of clicks to your website from the website link on your Google My Business profile.

Note that the new performance report provides the total interactions with the Google Business Profile. It does not include the views of the Google My Business profile. To see views, check “Where customers view your business on Google” on the Insights page.

Google My Business Insights - Profile Performance Report

Google My Business New Profile Performance Report

How to View Your Google Business Profile Insights

Access Insights for Individual Profiles

For your Insights reports, sign into your Google Business Profile account,

1. Sign into your Google Business Profile Account
2. On the left menu, click Insights.

The dashboard will show information for the past 28 days.

Here you can see how customers search for your business, whether they found your business listing on Google Search or Google Maps, and subsequent customer actions taken such as calls, messages or website visits.

Google My Business Menu- Selecting Insights

Google My Business Menu – Selecting Insights

3. To view more information about your Profile Performance and view data for longer periods, access the new profile performance report.

In the section on top of the dashboard titled Your Insights are Moving, click on the button See new profile performance.

Google My Business Insights - New Profile Performance Selection

Selecting the New Profile Performance Report

Access Performance Insights for your Google Business Profile directly from Google Search

1. Sign in with the same google account that you use to sign in to your Google Business Profile account.
2. Search on Google for your exact business name.
3. Select Promote > Performance
4. Select a date range for your report and click Apply

How you can use Insights to improve Local SEO

The data from Google Business Profile Insights can be used to make improvements to your Google My Business profile and local SEO strategy.

Some of the improvements you can make to your Google Business Profile and local SEO with Insights include:

  • Optimize your Google Business Profile. Check Related Articles below for some of our blog posts on Google My Business optimization.
  • Review search terms used by customers and offer products and services that customers are searching for.
  • Make use of Google My Business Posts to regularly post information about these products and services.
  • Optimize your website landing pages for on-page SEO.
  • Provide helpful website content about the products and services that customers are searching for.
  • Use these search keywords in your Google Ads PPC marketing strategy.
  • Get listed on online directory listings relevant to your industry.

Conclusion

In summary, Google Business Profile Insights reports and Profile Performance metrics gives you lots of information about how customers search for and find your business profile on Google Search and Google Ads.

By using Google Business Profile Insights, you can determine how customers searched for your business, where your visitors viewed your business, which search queries they used, and the actions they took to contact your business once they found your business profile.

This Insights data from Google Business Profile will help you make improvements to your Google My Business profile, your local SEO strategy, your organic SEO strategy, your Google Ads PPC marketing strategy and your website. This can help to drive more targeted traffic to your Google Business Profile to increase leads, conversions and sales.

All screenshots taken by author.

References

Related Articles

1. How to create and optimize a Google My Business Listing for your business
2. 11 New Google My Business Features for 2020 and Covid-19
3. New Google My Business Features to help your business reach more customers in 2019
4. What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization and Why is it Important?
5. 10 Local SEO Tips to Boost Local Search Rankings

Need Help with Google My Business or SEO?

If you need help with Google My Business or SEO, please feel free to contact us. We offer digital marketing services including Google Ads PPC Marketing, SEO, Local SEO, Web Design & Development, and Digital Marketing Consulting services. We are located in Plano, TX outside Dallas and serve businesses in the USA. Contact us at https://goldmangodesign.com