Matteo and Roy talk about how to read your Google My Business Insights and will give you a detailed explanation of each section.
The 3 main sections
Roy: Hello fellow crushes so welcome to a new video. So today we’re going to talk about how to read your Google My Business Insights. And we will give you a detailed explanation of each section. Let’s get started!
So the first part will be how customers will search for your business. So basically, this is divided into three main sections. So you have direct searches, discovery searches, and branded searches. So direct searches are people who are searching for your business by your name, or location and already know about you. They might have seen an ad or heard from you through a marketing campaign or found out from somebody else that they should be checking your business and should be engaging with your services or product.
The next one is discovery searches so people are searching for generic keywords related to your business like best barber shops in New York or seafood restaurants, these searches are highly likely coming from your SEO efforts. So these are the searches that contain a lot of monthly volume searches, or very niche focused searches and the high quality traffic towards your website or Google My Business listing. And the next part is the branded searches so these searches are queries that contain your brand name, for example, Nike shoes, or Michelin tires, so this is a little bit different from your direct searches. So how does this look, as you can see here in the graph, here, you can define the time periods from which you want the search arrested for. And here again, you see a little explanation from Google, what are direct searches, discovery searches and dependent searches.
So what is the difference between all the searches, so the main importance and the confusion are between director searches and branded searches. So the reason for this is because both of them will include your brand name. So, what will be a direct search and then what will be a branded search. So a direct shirt is for example, somebody is searching for your company or locations straight away, for example, you’re Nike, you’re searching for Nike or searching for a Nike store in a certain area, there will be countless direct searches. The branded search could be if they are searching for Nike T-shirts, or Nike shoes. So they’re searching for your brand, but they are also searching for another subject. So that’s a big difference between direct searches and branded searches. And of course, as we told you the discovery search is when they are searching for a certain category or product or a certain service without your business name, or any business name inside of there.
Customers View
Roy: So the next part is where customers will view your business on Google. So this section of insights shows you how many customers find you via Google search or through Google Maps. So you see the number of views your listing received for each of the services. So one to view shirts a customer finds you through the Google Search part, or to view on maps label, they will find your Google Maps and of course, data will also summarize the total of those two. So here we can see that visually, again, you can change the time period here, here you can see the total yields. And here you can see the listing on search or in Google Maps. When you hover over the items, you can see the results per day as well, easily illustrated. And this is a good indicator to see how well you’re doing on both the search engine platform and a map search.
Customer Actions
Roy: So the next part of the behavior signals we’re going to talk about are the customer actions. So this section shows how customers behave after they find your listing on Google. The graph shows how many customers have completed one of the following types of actions when viewing your listing. So they either visit your website so they click on a link that will be counted as one of the visit your website actions. Request directions so a customer requests directions to your business, so this will display as direction actions that you will show you soon or they have called you so a customer calls your business and this will displace as the phone call actions in your dashboard. Then of course you have the total actions which are all of the actions of both combined.
So here again, as you can see, you can change the time period, you can see what the number of total actions are being done. And then here on the right side, you can see the visits for websites, request directions, calls and also new one messaging you.
Direction Requests
Matteo: Okay, guys, let’s talk now about direction requests. This is a very cool section on Google My Business that shows where customers are when they request that action to your business. It’s very cool because it’s actually broken down by city or neighborhoods where people are finding your listing and this is the exact reason why they are launching direction requests to your listing. So it’s very important to consider all the, all the zip code areas where those driving requests are coming from, because it means that you will need to focus on launching and performing an additional audit, an additional GMB audit and see how your listing is performing in such a zip code area. And you want to be sure that you are really fully optimized, that you’re also showing your website is showing up correctly with for example, for location pages on Google search, and so on. So check monthly basis from which zip code or from which city or neighborhood those driving requests are coming from and you can implement, you know, your points of consideration into optimizing and to achieve a better optimization score for your Google My Business listing and your website, the content for your website.
Phone Calls
Matteo: Next, in the next slides we are going to talk about phone calls, we have been talking about phone calls and the importance of receiving a lot of phone calls already in a previous video. This section displays when and how often customers call it your business through your business listing. We discuss the importance of receiving phone calls because phone calls are part of the behavioral signals that are defining our, your GMB listing could potentially rank above the competition on the three pack. In the total cost graph, you can view strands of customer phone calls by day of week or time of the day. And you can use this information when a customer calls the most. So Google is putting a lot of resourcing and a lot of effort on developing these phone calls section further. It’s basically because they want to provide us with a one stop solution to track phone calls, booking and GMB messaging. So I think we should expect more features. And, you know, I really believe that this section is going to be further developed by Google and we will see a lot of cool things happening soon here.
In the drop down menu in the top right corner, also, it’s possible to adjust the timeframe to see data from the last week, the month or quarter as per the other sections. And this information can differ with your customer action during the difference in days. And the customer actions show the last 30 days while the phone calls tab shows the last 4 weeks. You see as you can, as you can see, graphically, this section is identical to the other sections that we have been checking and talking about so you can decide how do you want to filter the time period for, so you can check day of the week you can check for a month, you can check for the last quarter, and so on.
Popular Times
Roy: So the next part of the Google My Business Insights we’re going to talk about are the popular times and visit duration. So the popular times data is displayed in the insights section of Google My Business for businesses with a lot of foot traffic. So if you have corporate time displaying or your knowledge panel, then you will likely see this data in insights as well. However, visit duration and calculations are done differently than they do for popular times. It’s based on how much traffic you’ve received over the past few weeks, whereas popular time takes into account what has been going on within the last few months. So as you understand there’s a bit of a time difference there so the data will also be a little bit different. The popular time data is shown through different metrics to help customers better understand their businesses and visitors.
So how does this look? Here on the left top, you can see the day. So here you can choose between Monday and Sunday and on the graph below, you can see the most popular times. So here it already says your most popular time around today is 11am on a Friday, and then here below, on the visit duration, you can see the average visits to your location. This data is not always available, in this example it’s not. But for example, if you have a restaurant where a lot of people stay for a long time, Google gets more data and then you can see the average visits to your location last about 1 hour, 2 hours. Now the time you will spend talking and enjoying your wine and your little dinner.
Photo Views
The next part of Google My Business insight we’re going to talk about are the photos. So this section displays the number of photos associated with your listing, and how often they’re viewed compared to similar businesses and the following graphs. So you have photo views, how many times your photos have been viewed in total, and of course, the photo quantity, how many photos you’ve uploaded to your business listing. So let’s take a look at this section.
So here in the top, you see the photo views so this is the number of times your poses can be viewed compared to photos from other businesses. So in this case, we have been doing very well. So businesses like you, like businesses that have the same kind of search couriers, like you’ll have the same subjects, same categories. In our case, they have 172 views on their pictures but in this particular case, we have 2450 so from this information, we can conclude that we’re doing very well on the photo optimization part and we don’t have to spend too much attention on optimizing this. But if it’s the other way around, then you know, I have to look at my competition, what they are doing with the photos and probably start copying and improving that.
Photo Quantity
Roy: Next part is probably the quantity so the photo quantity exists in two different parts. So we can divide this by customer photos and owner photos. The owner’s photos mean that the pictures are being uploaded by yourself through the listing. And the customer photos are of people that are in your location, and they do the geo tagging and tag your name and they write a review about your business with a photo. So in our graph below, we see the businesses like you, how many owner photos and customer photos they have and how you are comparing. And in this case, it’s going pretty well, if I can say myself.
Search Queries
Matteo: Now about search queries. Search Term is a section of the Google My Business Insights that lets you see the top search terms your customers are searching to find and interact with your business. This is a very powerful section guys and I fully recommend you to check it in deeper like every 30 days and start to create a spreadsheet with all the popular search terms that are driving visibility to your Google My Business listing. And once you have all the top search terms that are driving engagement to your GMB, you can also start to create a content plan for your GMB post strategy using those keywords and so that you can expand and create more relevance around your GMB content. And also, this will reward your business, your Google My Business listing with higher ranking and with more visibility every time somebody’s searching for a query that can be easily associated with your products and services.
So if you notice why you are searching for something locally, Google is also associating them pulling out a lot of data directly from your Google posts, from your GMB FAQ, from your product or services and from what we have been notice and reading also on some other popular blogs such as Sterling sky; there are a lot of signals that Google is basically scraping and automatically adding like product and service categories directly to your GMB based on your content site. So we need to understand that the Google My Business posts are also part of this data that Google is using and scanning and crawling to better understand what your business is about. And you also want to be sure, of course, that you are fully optimized by leveraging those top search terms that are attached to your Google My Business listing, okay. It also shows you in a graph, how many business profile interactions were made for the specific time period. And business profile interactions are divided into the following parts; so calls, messages and bookings. Let’s talk and see a bit more in depth about this!
On top of the Insights page, you get a message with your insights. So basically, Google is moving and building or rebuilding part of the Google My Business dashboard. And this is also a new section that ‘s very, very interesting and let’s have a look together about this. Okay, guys, we are into the dashboard of one of our clients and as I said before you can see on top of your Google My Business dashboard that your insights are moving. And as Google says, your matrix will move to a new look report. So Google, my business is always putting a lot of effort in further developing some of this section, and search queries are visible and more matrices will be added in a few months. So this is for sure, a section that you want to keep monitoring, okay.
So we can just click to see new profile performance, we can just define a period of time that we want to dig into. And, you know, on these sites we have, we can clearly see how people discovered you. So in the last 30 days, 7562 people viewed this business profile and also, Google My Business is providing us with a simple breakdown about the platform and the devices that people use to find our profile, our clients. So this is how the pie chart is divided so we can clearly see how our user side has found our profile, the business profile of our clients from mobile, from Google Search, Google Maps, and what the percentage of the section is. On the left, on the right side we can also read more, more, we can find more information about the search terms that return your profile in the results so we can clearly see which are the keywords that were triggering the Google My Business listing appearing for multiple keywords; you can simply click to the ‘See More’ button and you can have a clear breakdown of what Google searches were driving more visibility to the, this specific GMB listing, okay.
So you can see it’s very important here to check the full listing of keywords, some of those keywords are in Thai language because we do live in Bangkok, we are based in Thailand. I’m pretty sure that you can also find, you know, if you are based in the US or in an English speaking country, you will see a full list of keywords in your own language. And as I said before, it’s very important to dig deeper inside the list of keywords that are triggering your GMB listing appearing on Google search because that can empower your Google My Business posting strategy. You can post more pictures about certain items, such as cannoli, so cannoli, it’s a very it’s a typical it’s a typical research that we have in Italy. So it might be useful and cool for this specific business to post and create new Google My Business posts about, for example, cannoli, okay, just to give you a simple idea.
So scrolling down again, we have all the other sections that we already discussed. So such where customers view your business in Google, customer actions and this listing is, for example, collecting a very good amount of driving requests, phone calls and people that click to visit the website. Another interesting section from the Google My Business dashboard, it’s what your business is known for and this section is showing how you score on key attributes that our customers decide where to go. So basically, Google it’s running a kind of sentiment analysis, using the keywords from your GMB reviews and from those keywords and the content published by customer, it’s able to understand the key attributes of your listing if your place it’s a popular place for dinner, if your place is serving a great dessert, if it’s a great place to grab a coffee, if it’s a cozy place it’s a popular place for tourists and so on. Okay, so this is very important because you want to keep watching how Google is seeing your business and what kind of key attributes are coming up, and are popping up from your customer reviews, okay.
Another interesting section inside the Google My Business dashboard, it’s so called popular times and it’s basically showing the popular time of your business. So we can see for example from this listing that most of the customers are joining the location at 12pm, of course for lunch and they probably stay a few hours here. So in fact, you can also see the visit duration and the average visit to your location lasts 2 hours. So basically it’s very important also to monitor popular times information from your top competitors so you can see and understand how much time is spent on average by potential clients and by the other clients on your competitor listings location.
Okay guys, for today this is everything. Thank you for watching the video and we hope to see you soon again. Thank you
Listen/Watch the full episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSzfhavR2U0
SEO Lover, my motto is Action Over Words.
