This is the fourth entry in my Daily Golden Nugget series explaining how to manage your Google business account through the Google My Business interface. I've included links to the first three parts at the bottom of today's edition.
Today's My Business topic is the reading and understanding the Insights app within the Google My Business interface. Once you log into your account, you need to click the box-cluster icon on the top right of your browser window as shown here:
Then click on the Insights icon with the two green arrows to access this page:
What you see in the above graphic, is the typical layout for a local business. Non local Google+ pages will not have a chart for Clicks, Driving directions, or Phone calls.
Views
The first chart shows how people found your Google+ page. You can click the chevron next to the total views to see a breakdown of the different types of page views as seen here:
Within the breakdown above, we can see that there were 4,607 times this page in Google Maps, mobile maps, and search.
There are 369 times people saw the socially shared content to Google+.
There are 61 profile views, which is the number of times people looked at your Google+ page.
We then see there are 2,049 times when the photos uploaded to Google+ were viewed. This includes views on Google+, search, image search, and maps.
Clicks
The next chart shows how people clicked on your business information when they found you in search results. Click the chevron next to the total clicks to see the additional details like those you see here:
Here's how to read the numbers you see in the above image:
* There are 38 clicks from SERPs to your website
* There are 0 clicks for driving direction requests (this is a function of Google Maps and Mobile Maps)
* There are 9 clicks on your telephone number. Those clicks were probably from smartphones from people who called instead of looking at your website. Note: I was writing this last week on the day that Google announced the "Phone Calls" section you'll find below. At the time of this writing, the phone calls information below was more accurate than this original call counter.
Driving direction requests
Most of you probably won't see too much information here because Google can't report it until there are a lot of requests. You might see some data during busy times of the year, like the holiday season. During that time, you might see the town names that people searched for side-by-side with a heat map showing the towns and a visualization of where people where when asking for those directions.
Phone Calls
The bar chart they provide in this section will show you how many calls you've received over the selected time frame.
You can change the format of this chart to show the time of day that people were calling you as shown in this screen grab:
Engagement & Audience Insights
The My Business Insights app has two other sections called Engagement and Audience with appropriate charts for each. I'll continue with the explanation of those tomorrow.
The one report that's missing from the new My Business interface is the query report. This is the report I'm referring to that was removed. We'll probably never see that type of keyword report from Google again.
Here's the links to the first 3 Nuggets in this series:
1. Basic orientation of Google My Business
2. Editing your information in My Business
3. Reading and replying to Google Reviews
