The first thing business owners instinctively look for after getting up and going with Google My Business is a way to understand how effective their efforts have been and what kind of traffic their Google My Business listing is driving to their business. The Insights tab inside of the Google My Business Dashboard shows this information broken down into five sections. Let’s walk through what each section shows you.
How Customers Search For Your Business
This first section shows a graph that displays results of “Direct” searches vs. “Discovery” searches. A “Direct” search is a search on Google where the searcher put your business name or address directly into the search. A “Discovery” search is a search on Google where they were looking for a category, product, or service that your business offers. This can be useful to help you get a quick overview of how customers are finding your business and potentially the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) efforts.
Where Customers View Your Business on Google
The second section of your business’s Insights tab shows the breakdown of how customers found your business between Google Search and Google Maps over time. You can click the check boxes on the right side of the graph to turn on/off different segments. Understanding where and how your customers are finding you on Google can give you additional insights into the workflow they might be following when they search. For example, searching for your business on Google Maps could mean that they are in the area and trying to find what is close by and you can start to think about how you can attract those types of customers that may not be familiar with your business.
Customer Actions
This section shows you what a customer did once they found your Google My Business listing. The “total actions” shows the aggregate value of all the actions a customer could have taken while interacting with your listing: Visit your website, Request directions, Call you, and View photos. You can hover over a particular day and see the individual breakdown of each action. You can also click on the check boxes to the right to enable/disable various segments so that you can drill down on specific actions you might be interested in.
Driving Directions Requests
The fourth section shows a heat map of the most popular place from where people asked for driving directions in Google Maps. This is an interesting view because you might find you have a concentration of customers in an area you weren’t aware of. With that understanding you can start to think about how to drive hyper-focused local marketing in a particular neighborhood or even a place to expand to an additional location.
Phone Calls
The final section shows the time of day and how frequently customers called your business via your Google My Business listing. The graph lets you adjust the time range and you can even see trends like calls by “Day of week” or “Time of Day”. This is another interesting view that can give you understanding of when customers are most likely to call your business after finding your listing.
Current Reviews and Actions
In nearly every case we have seen, the number of reviews and overall review rating have a significant correlation to a customer preforming an action when they find your Google My Business listing. Not only does the total number of reviews influence your prominence in search results, but once your listing is displayed in the results, the implicit trust that comes having a high number of reviews and a solid rating is reflected in the increased number of actions customers preform while interacting with your listing. By working to increase those reviews and ratings, you should see an corresponding increase customer actions, driving requests, and phone calls through interaction with your Google My Business listing.
More information about understanding the Insights tab can be found on the Google My Business support site.
