Enterprise users of Google My Business, rejoice! Late last week, Google rolled out the ability to download Insights data, in bulk, straight from your dashboard. With no access to the API required, this new feature enables a whole new set of users to measure and report on the performance of their listings within Google Search and Google Maps.
WOOT!
Those who manage accounts via the GMB API have been able to download Insights data in bulk since January of this year, but last week’s release marks a major step forward for anyone who manages multiple locations via the GMB dashboard. Previously, GMB users could only view Insights data for one location at a time through the card view in the dashboard, and even then, there was no way to efficiently collect that data for use outside of the dashboard. The previous setup offered no plausible solution for bulk users to report on key Insights data.
But now, users can download the following data points in 7-, 30-, or 90-day intervals, aggregated* for each location:
| Total searches | Total number of keywords for which a location surfaced in search |
| Direct searches | Number of times a location surfaced in search for a branded search |
| Discovery searches | Number of times a location surfaced in search for a non-branded search |
| Total views | Total number of impressions a location received from search (Google.com + Google Maps) |
| Search views | Total number of impressions a location received from Google Search |
| Maps views | Total number of impressions a location received from Google Maps |
| Total actions | Total number of times someone interacted with our listing in search ("action" = clicked to call, clicked for driving direction, or clicked to visit website) |
| Website actions** | Total number of times someone clicked to visit the website from a listing |
| Directions actions | Total number of times someone clicked to get driving directions to a location |
| Phone call actions | Total number of times someone clicked to call a location |
*Insights data is only available in aggregate for the time period you select, and that’s probably our biggest gripe about this new feature. If you really want to get granular, you can set your customized date range to one day and export daily metrics that way. Or, you can use a tool like GMBData to collect your data into a dashboard daily.
**It’s not clear whether website actions is the total number of times someone clicked the listing to visit the website, or the total number of times someone clicked the ‘Website’ globe icon on the listing to visit the website. We are assuming the latter since the other two ‘actions’ available within this data set are tied to icons on the listing, but we could be wrong.
How can you use this Google My Business data?
Put shortly, a lot, but one of the biggest advantages to having this data available now is that you can use it to prove the value of local search marketing. Using this data combined with and other industry benchmarks and the average revenue from a store visit, we’re able to estimate that local search drove over $32 million in revenue in Q1 for one of our clients. How’s that for ROI?
The Seer team brainstormed other ways we could get useful insights from Insights data (heh). Usage of different data points will vary by industry, but here are some of our ideas so far:
- Look at Direct vs Discovery Searches in aggregate for a particular segment or all of your locations. If more people are finding you from branded (Direct) searches vs non branded (Discovery) searches, that might be because you’re not showing up highly for those non branded searches.
- Use Direct vs Discovery Searches to guide your PPC bid strategy and optimize campaigns. If you have locations that have a higher-than-average count of non branded (Discovery) searches, that probably means they rank highly organically for non branded searches. You may be able to save some money and scale back bidding for non branded terms in those areas.
- Look at actions data (website, directions, phone) to evaluate whether or not your listings provide enough information, and to identify pain points.
- I believe that people should be able to get most of the info they need straight from your listing in a SERP, so if you have a disproportionately high ratio of clicks on your website to clicks for driving directions, that could be a symptom of an under-optimized listing. If you don’t already have it, utilize a tool like Crazy Egg to see what content customers are interacting with on your landing pages after they get there. If you can pull any of it into your listings, do it!
- GMB’s reporting a high number of driving directions and phone calls? Maybe your pin is placed incorrectly and people have to call the store to get accurate directions after they’ve already tried to get to you.
- Getting a lot of clicks on your website from your listing, but reporting a low number of visits in GA or Adobe? Maybe the page you’ve linked in GMB is slow to load and customers aren’t waiting around for it.
- GMB’s reporting a lot of clicks to call from your listing, but the store says they’re not receiving that many phone calls? Make sure you call routing is functioning properly.
- Use clicks for driving directions to estimate revenue (like we did above). Google and comScore have reported that people searching for local businesses are highly likely to visit a store and make a purchase. Let’s use Google’s data to build a formula: [number of clicks for driving directions from GMB] * 50% [estimated percentage of people who actually visit a store after searching] * 18% [estimated percentage of local searches that lead to an in-store purchase] * [average value of a store visit or in-store purchase] = revenue estimate.
How are we at Seer using this data?
We’re working on something pretty cool, and we could use your help. Now that we can pull Insights data for all of our clients, we’re curious if we can spot any trends in how consumers interact with businesses across different verticals through local search. So far, we have data from our own clients in the following verticals:
- Fuel / Convenience
- Healthcare - Hospital Networks
- Healthcare - Home Healthcare / Assisted Living
- Retail Banking
- Financial Consulting
If you’d like to help us analyze how people behave across different industries, please email your 90-day bulk Insights data and your primary GMB category to CoriS at seerinteractive dot com. Please limit data pulls to 90 days–we’re expecting seasonality to greatly affect user behavior, so we're planning to re-pull and re-analyze every 3 or 6 months.
Also, please feel free to anonymize it -- we don’t need to know who you are, we just need to know which category to sort you into. We’d love to get some folks who work in:
- Hotels
- Retail (Clothing, Home Goods, Consumer Electronics, etc)
- Restaurants
- Pharmacies
- Insurance Agents
- Lawyers
- Car Dealers
We will update this post once we’ve had a chance to dig into everything. Thanks in advance for your help, and we’re looking forward to seeing what we find!
-- Cori, Christina, Greta, Jackie, Kevin, Lauren, Liz, Maggie, & Sarah
If you are interested in learning more about how Seer can help you in your local SEO efforts, drop us a line!
