GMB (Google My Business) is an essential tool for any business owner, as it helps you put your company on the map. It also provides you with additional benefits such as the Google my Business analytics function, which can give you key insights on how your business is performing according to KPIs (key performance indicators).
Google My Business analytics can play a huge role in figuring out how customers are finding your business on the internet, and also tell you whether or not they are taking action. Customer engagement data is one of the most reliable metrics you have for determining whether your marketing strategy is paying dividends. If you don’t know if customers are interacting with your website, how do you know if the marketing efforts have been worthwhile?
1. Why is tracking Google My Business necessary?
If you’re a business owner with aspirations of growing your company, then you need to be keeping tabs on your Google My Business page.
Why?
Because it can help you make the right decisions to take your business forward. If you’re struggling to expand and reach new customers, then taking a look inwards at what is currently happening with your company’s online efforts can be very revealing.
It can inform your marketing efforts, let you know if what you’re doing is making customers want to engage with your content, and tell you how well your business is performing in the local SEO rankings.
As such. It provides a plethora of useful data which you can then use to boost your bottom line and expand the business successfully.
In the world of business, you have to be willing to react to changing situations and adapt constantly. It isn’t enough to simply check in on your business’s KPIs once in a blue moon, you need to know week by week how many customers are finding your company, what your click-through rate is, and how many messages you’ve received
If you’re serious about building a brand with staying power, then you need to be constantly acting on the information that Google My Business analytics provides.
2. Google My Business Analytics Guide: how can you track your rankings?
Within your Google My Business company page, you’ll have access to dozens of tools and metrics which can help you track your rankings.
So what should you pay attention to and what can you afford to ignore?
Above everything else, these are the three metrics you should track to stay on top of your rankings:
How Customers Find Your Business
Within the GMB page, you’ll be presented with a pie chart that breaks down how customers have searched for your business.
The chart is broken down into the following three search methods:
Direct
A direct search is one in which the customer has found your GMB page by typing in your business’ name or address.
Discovery
A discovery search refers to when customers find your GMB page through looking for a particular product, service, or category.
Branded
A branded search is when your customers are looking for a brand similar to your business, and stumble upon yours.
You will also see a total search figure, which will let you know how many searches you’ve had from all sources.
This information is critical, as it lets you know whether or not you’re marketing your business well.
It also tells you whether you aren’t appearing in the types of searches you’d like to be, which can inform your response. For example, if you aren’t appearing in a lot of direct searches, then maybe you need to come up with a content strategy that gets the word out there about your business name, and secures backlinks from websites with authority.
Customer Actions
Another key metric to track in your GMB page is customer actions.
Customer actions refers to how your customers are engaging with your business online.
The graph will show you how many customers have visited your website for the month, how many people request directions to your business using Google Maps, and how many have called you.
This information can tell you when you need to overhaul your marketing approach to bring in more customers to your website, for example. It can be hard to interpret at times, though, because more calls could mean business is booming or it could mean people are calling to ask clarifying questions because you haven’t made some information readily available.
Photo Actions
When it comes to making a decision about where to eat, what furniture store to shop at, or where to stay on holiday, many people like to see photos of the businesses they are considering.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it’s been shown that businesses that have more than 100 photos get 1,065% more website clicks than those which don’t, along with more calls and direction requests.
As such, having access to information about how many people are viewing photos connected to your business can be huge.
Fortunately, GMB provides you with just such data with its photo insights feature, that tells you both how many views your business photos have accumulated and how many there are in total.
Photo Views
Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of seeing your total photo views is that GMB will display this information, and also show you how your competitors are doing in the same metric. This is information you can use to guage how you are doing up against your closest competition.
Photo Quantity
The photo quantity metric is interesting in that it shows you how many photos you’ve uploaded to your GMB listing. It will also tell you how many photos your customers have uploaded, too.
If you have a lot of customers posting photos pertaining to their experience with your business, that’s usually a good sign. Though you should make an effort to vet these photos, since if they in any way misrepresent your company then they could provide the wrong impression to other customers.
You can track this information on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis which can be useful for assessing how your business is performing in different seasons and times of the year.
Other Useful Metrics
As well as the top three metrics we’ve singled out, there are a couple of others that you may find useful to glance at from time time.
Popular Times
This simple bar chart will tell you what hours you are most busy, according to the day.
You can use this information to try and increase foot traffic during certain hours. For example, if you run a restaurant that’s struggling to get people in the doors on a Sunday morning, could you offer a brunch deal to entice passersby?
Search Queries
Search queries simply tells you what keywords people are using to find your GMB page.
This is hugely useful for creating marketing and ad campaigns, as well as coming up with an effective content strategy.
What Your Business is Known for
If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly why people are choosing your business over the competition, this metric will be useful.
With this bar chart, you’ll see what people mention when they leave reviews about your business.
This could give you key information such as the fact that a lot of people like how kid-friendly your business is. On the flip side, you can see what’s missing from the list, such as ‘good ambiance’ for example, and do your best to remedy that by brainstorming how you can improve the vibe in your coffee shop.
3. How to set up tracking in Google My Business?
At this point, you might be thinking ‘this all sounds great, but how on earth do you track all of these metrics using Google My Business?’
Don’t worry, that’s what we’re here for!
In this step-by-step guide we’re going to walk you through the process of setting up tracking in Google My Business from start to finish.
To Check Insights
- To check your company insights, you should first sign into your GMB account.
- Next, click on the ‘Insights’ tab on the left-hand side of the screen. Once your GMB page is verified, you’ll have access to key data about your business.
To Link Google my Business to analytics
If you truly want to make the most of the information Google has about your business’s online presence, it’s a good idea to learn how to access Google analytics from My Google Business page.
To do so, you’ll need a custom UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor) code, which is essentially just text on the end of a URL that will give you key information regarding the source of the click and other information.
Here’s how you can do that:
- Sign in to your GMB page and click on the ‘Info’ tab.
- Next, where it says ‘website’ you’ll see an edit icon to the right of it which you’ll have to click.
- Now you’ll be able to insert your UTM code in the website field on the end of your website URL.
4. Google My Business Analytics: what data can you get from it?
Google My Business analytics is a comprehensive tool that can provide business owners with a wealth of data they can use to drive company growth.
According to Google, it ‘helps you understand how people use your sites and apps’.
As such, it’s an invaluable tool if you’re looking to manage your company’s online reputation and keep tabs on customer engagement with your business.
The kind of data you can get from Google’s analytics tool varies from visualization in the form of graphs and charts to raw data providing you figures and competitor information.
The data you get from analytics can be broadly split up into the following categories:
- How customers find your business
- Where customers view your business
- What actions customers take regarding your business
5. How to use data from Google My Business Analytics to grow your business?
If you want your budding business to grow, then the data you receive from Google My Business analytics can be a helpful tool to have in your arsenal.
What this information does is allow business-owners to adopt a data-driven approach to their marketing efforts, which is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to secure more customers.
After all, if you aren’t using data to inform your business and marketing decisions, then what are you basing them on?
This analytics data can help you climb the local SEO rankings, as it can help you identify your company’s main strengths and weaknesses. What’s more, it will tell you how your company ranks in the most important KPIs compared to your closest competitors.
GMB analytics also stores all of this useful data in one place, so when it’s time to hold meetings about the direction your company is heading, you can quickly and easily consult the relevant data to help grow the business.
Even if you yourself can’t make sense of all the figures presented to you in the analytics page of your GMB listing, having this information on hand can make it easy for you to hire someone who can interpret it. Bringing in an SEO or marketing expert is much easier to do when you can show them how your business is performing in the digital space.