Measuring for Success: Google My Business Insights Explained

Google My Business is one of the many ways customers seek out your business. They may find it through Google Search or Maps. After all, 84% of consumers turn to search engines to find out information for a local purchase and much of that information comes from a company’s GMB listing.

Like all traffic sources, it’s important to monitor which kinds of audiences you’re dealing with to help you make better marketing decisions. But how do you know who is visiting your Google My Business listing? Luckily, Google offers Insights for their listings to help you focus on how customers are finding your listing and where they go afterwards.

How does Google My Business Insights work?

Google My Business offers plenty of ways for you to understand how customers are finding your listing and how they interact with it. Here are the many ways you can measure the success of your listing:

• How customers find your listing
• Search queries
• Where customers find you on Google
• Customer actions
• Direction requests
• Phone calls
• Photos
• What your business is known for

Each of these items give an inside look at the performance metrics of your listing.

To navigate to your Google My Business analytics, click on Insights on the left menu bar and you'll be directed to your Insights dashboard.

Understanding the Google My Business Insights Dashboard

How customers search for your business

The first thing you’ll see on the Insights dashboard is how customers are finding your listing on Google. You can set this to view 1 week, 1 month or 1 quarter.

Direct searches are people who have found your business listing by searching your name or location directly. This means that these people have heard about you and your business before, and because these searches are specific, these people are likely seeing a knowledge graph of your business listing through search results.

Discovery searches are searches where people have found your listing through organic keywords or categories relating to your business. We can assume these people have likely never heard of your business.

Branded searches come from search queries about a brand that is directly related to your businesses, and happens to stumble upon your listing. You can attribute this to a partnership or perhaps a client you’ve worked with that appears on your website.

Queries used to find your business

The next section in the dashboard you’ll see are search terms that unique users have searched to find your listing. You can also set this to view different periods.

Keep in mind that these terms are localized, so while people may be finding your listing with a popular search query, these are mostly local searches.

For example, if a popular query is luxury apartment, you rank for that on a localized level so people in your area searching that are coming across your listing, not necessarily other users outside of your geographical location.

Pro Tip: Want more local customers to find your Google My Business listing? Consider creating a post with categories and keywords that improves the search ranking of your listing.

Where customers view your business on Google

This section gives you an inside look at your listing’s presence on Google Search and Google Maps. This helps you better understand how customers are finding your listing, whether it’s through search or maps.

Businesses that have foot traffic, like a shop, restaurant or a hotel could have higher Maps results here than in Search if people are often looking for directions to the location.

Keep in mind: when both boxes are checked, this graph is cumulative. Hover over the graph to see the unique stats between Search and Maps.

Customer actions

This is a great marketing attribution tool for your Google My Business to better understand where traffic is coming from. You can monitor website visitors, direction requests, phone calls and chats made directly from your GMB listing.

This also gives you an idea of the performance level of your GMB efforts overall. If you have low website traffic funneling in from your listing, consider creating more posts or updating photos to entice customers to explore your website.

Direction requests

Directions requests shows you where people are searching for directions, but it also gives you a  localized map to gauge where customers may be as well. It’s safe to assume that if they’re searching for directions in that area, you could have a lot customers there, too.

Again, this tool is ideal for businesses with more foot traffic.

Phone calls

This section gives you an idea of how phone calls are coming in from your listing. You can measure by day of week, compared to the week, month or quarter.

If you have high call volume in general, measuring this statistic can help you gauge your most active call day or season where you can improve.

Photo views and photo quantity

This section displays the number of times that your business photos have been viewed, compared to other businesses. That makes this an extremely useful tool, especially if you’re conducting a competitor analysis with your visual marketing efforts.

You can see where you need to improve, whether it’s your own photos or customer-generated photos. Google will also give you a percentage of how many views you receive in comparison to similar businesses.

Similarly, the section below photo views is photo quantity, which helps you see how many photos you have contributed to your listing compared to businesses like yours.

Why should I use Google My Business Insights?

Your GMB listing is one of the first discoveries local customers make about your business. It’s yet another analytics tool to attribute your marketing efforts, understand online and offline traffic and compare your business to similar businesses.

Leveraging Google My Business Insights adds that missing piece to your digital marketing mix to further understand the performance of your efforts.