TL;DR
- Google Business Profile (GBP) insights contain valuable KPIs that cannot be found anywhere else.
- More views happen on your business profiles than on your website.
- GBP insights can’t be archived natively. You need 3rd party software to preserve the insights captured by GBP.
Google Analytics, Search Console, and ranking reports are not silver bullets for doing attribution for your organization’s visibility on local search and maps. Sure, they can tell you a lot about how people found your website, but that won’t tell you how people interact with your business before they go to your website, if they ever even go there at all.
For context, most businesses get as much as five times as many views on their Google Business Profile (GBP) compared to views of their business website.
Just last month (May 2023), one of our enterprise clients got ~200,000 website visits last month, but over 1,000,000 views on GBP.
Businesses get as much as five times as many views on their Google Business Profile compared to views of their website.
Google Analytics and Search Console are not enough
A comprehensive marketing and business attribution strategy certainly includes Google Analytics, Search Console, and Tag Manager. However, many organizations, particularly those with retail or physical storefronts, should also be incorporating GBP into their monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting.
Why is that important?
The following five metrics are only visible in Google Business Profile insights. You won’t find them in Google’s analytics or insights products.
1. Direction Requests
Direct Requests are important because they are directly correlated with store visits and foot traffic to a business. For some businesses like restaurants, a majority of their sales and revenue will come from this type of traffic.
How many direction requests convert to a sale? This is anecdotal, but I know in my personal consumption of Google Maps that when I request directions, I’m on my way to that place or business.
You’ll have to work on your own projections, but we recommend using a 50-70% conversion rate to a store visit.
Direction Requests = Business!
2. Mobile Phone Calls
Mobile Phone Calls can technically be measured with third-party tracking tools like CallRail or CallTrackingMetrics, but that requires a budget for call tracking, which most businesses don’t have. The ability to measure one of the primary sources of phone calls for most businesses without any special setup or budget is pretty cool.
Keep in mind that the default tracking here is limited to only click-to-call actions from mobile devices. Although some people are comfortable with and capable of placing a call from their desktop, the convenience of click-to-call on mobile surfaces is what most consumers prefer.
Check your profile views to determine what device users are visiting your business profile from to determine if you need additional call tracking to see the full picture.
The ability to measure one of the primary sources of phone calls for most businesses without any special setup or budget, is pretty cool.
3. Keywords and Impressions
Keywords and Impressions are available in Google Search Console, but the search console can be hard to filter to only your GBP results. More importantly, Search Console does not have any access to results on Google Maps, which is a big blindspot for this channel considering that GBP powers Google Maps results for businesses.
Search Console does not have any access to results on Google Maps.
4. Profile Views
Profile Views represent what device and platform users used to view your content on GBP. This is very important when auditing your content on GBP. It ensures you are providing the best user experience possible by evaluating your content and overall user experience on all devices and platforms your GBP will be found.
5. Bookings
Bookings is an awesome GBP feature that makes it easier for users to make reservations or book appointments at your business. Although there are some great third-party reservation and integration partners on GBP, not all have clear reporting or attribution on how many bookings were made natively on your business profile.
Bookings make it easier for users to make reservations or book appointments at your business.
The value of a booking can also be easily calculated if you know your company’s average order value. Some platforms like SevenRooms capture the check value for restaurants, and you can easily view the gross revenue of bookings from Google integrations.
So why aren’t more businesses using Google Business Profile insights as a KPI?
There’s a big problem with GBP insights.
They are evasive. You lose access to them on a 6-18 month rolling basis. You log in today and see one set of data; a few days or weeks later, it’s different.
Natively, you can see your performance insights but only for a rolling time frame. For example, if you logged into GBP today, you might see something like this when clicking on “Performance.”
Roll-up reporting is limited to the last six months only
If you choose only one month of data in the native platform, you can see a YoY comparison and data by the day, but if you select more than one month, you can only see a monthly view, which is very limiting.
YOY reporting is limited to only one month at a time
If you’re a multi-location business, you can “download insights” from the business profile manager dashboard, but if you select the last 18 months, you only get one metric for that entire time frame. That means you’d have to do 540 exports to get a daily view of your data or 18 individual exports to see the high-level monthly data.
Then you need to merge and blend that data together into something like Looker Studio or a custom spreadsheet.
Ew! That’s a lot of (insert colorful word) work!
Thankfully, there is a better way.
You’re not alone. We used to do this the hard way too. In fact, capturing data beyond six months was the first problem we solved for ourselves. It became popular with our clients too, so we decided to turn it into a product.
Today, we help businesses solve this important issue on a daily basis. I love seeing people getting into their data, especially as it accumulates with them over time.
You can try Map Labs for free. For 30 days, you get the full-meal deal. After that, there’s no obligation. You can keep using it free for single locations without losing your data.
As soon as you connect, you immediately get 18 months of insights that accumulate every day. One of our clients manages over five years of GBP insights. So why wait?
Give it a go, and let me know what you think.
