This guide is different.

Here, I’ll focus on the what and why of UTM tracking from a multi-location business perspective. I’ll cover and tackle the issues and opportunities experienced by those managing GBPs for multi-location businesses.

If this is you, then you’re in the right place—let’s dive right in!

What is a UTM tag?

UTM stands for ‘Urchin Tracking Module’. The ‘Urchin’ part is left over from when Google acquired Urchin in 2005 and formed what we now know as Google Analytics. This isn’t relevant to this guide, but by knowing it you’ll feel clever, and maybe it’ll come up as a question in a pub quiz one day.

Think of UTM tags as tracking modules that we add to the end of our external links—which are links from other websites that point to our own.

We don’t add UTM tags to our internal links because that would mess up our data big time. DON’T do it.

Why should I add UTM tracking to Google Business Profile?

Google Business Profile Insights can tell us about the actions that customers and potential customers take on our GBPs, such as making a phone call, requesting driving directions, or sending a message.

GBP Insights also provides a metric called ‘Visit your website’:

You know what? The ‘Visit your website’ metric only includes clicks on the ‘primary website’ link in your profile.

What GBP Insights doesn’t tell us is the number of people who click through from the different links in your Business Profile, or what they do on your website once they get there.

Without UTM tags, traffic from your GBP will show in Google Analytics (GA) as either ‘direct’ or ‘organic’. Unfortunately, this isn’t helpful if you’re trying to separate out web traffic into people that click through from the regular organic results, and those who arrive from one of the links in GBP.

Another bonus is that when you add UTM tagging, you can separate out your Business Profile links, clicks, and impressions from your regular organic results in Google Search Console (GSC). This means you can see the search phrases people used that triggered those local organic results. Yay! More on this later.

Where can I add UTM tracking in Google Business Profile?

GBP and the pieces that populate it are in a constant state of flux as Google tests new features, monetizes previously free features, and so on.

For the most part, the links available to you will depend on your primary category, this may include:

1. Primary website
2. Appointments
3. Menu
4. Place an order
5. Find a table/make a reservation
6. COVID-19 information
7. Virtual care
8. Google Products
9. Google Posts

Let’s take a look at how you might use each of these options:

Primary Website

For a single-location business—or perhaps a business with only a handful of locations—you’d generally link to the homepage of the business website. Multi-location businesses will want to link from here to their specific location landing pages, which will have been brilliantly optimized, of course. 

Appointments

The appointments URL should link to the page on your website that allows users to book an appointment, usually via a booking form.

If you don’t have a dedicated page for booking appointments, then you might link to your ‘contact us’ page instead. If you do this, then make sure it’s clear that people can contact you to make an appointment.

Menu

The menu link should link through to…you guessed it…the relevant menu landing page for that location.

Naturally, this link will only be available to those in the food and beverage industries! 

Place an Order

This needs to link to a page on your website that allows a customer to place an order, or explains the details of how to do so.

Find a Table

This link should point to your table scheduling page, if you have one. Similarly to the menu option, it will only be available to hospitality businesses. 

COVID-19 Information

COVID-19 information should sit on a separate page on your site. It’s wise to keep this updated with how your business is responding to the current situation, especially since government guidelines are often subject to change.

Your COVID-19 information should include details of how the pandemic is affecting the delivery of products and services, if relevant.

Virtual Care

If you’re a healthcare organization offering virtual care, then you can link to the page that details how this works. This is only available in the US and the link will only show on mobile.

Google Products

If your business uses Google Products, then you’ll want to link through to those product pages.

Google Posts

If your business uses Google Posts, then you can link through to a relevant page.

Remember, Posts can be used to announce new products, share a special offer, invite your customers to an event, and much more.

Which URLs should I UTM tag?

You’d think this question would have an obvious answer. But it’s a little more nuanced.

First of all, you’ll want to make sure that the URL resolves with a 200 status code. Don’t link to a URL that redirects as this might strip the UTM tagging from the URL. We really don’t want that.

Tagging URLs isn’t a one and done process because URLs may change for any number of reasons. When they do, you’ll need to update the URL at source. I’ve lost count of the number of GBP URLs I’ve clicked on that return a 404 error (page not found) or go through a series of redirects.

Businesses often update the primary URL but forget about the appointment URL, the menu URL, etc. If you want to use GA to monitor the behavior of visitors that come to your website from these GBP links, then those URLs will need to be accurate.

Remember, if you’re linking through to a URL on a third-party platform, then you’re not going to see GSC or GA data for that search or that visit!

Incorporating UTM Tagging into Existing Reporting Processes

You’re likely now asking yourself, “How can I make sure my tagging framework plays nicely with any existing reporting framework?”

Before you implement UTM tracking, you need to confirm who manages data and reporting for the business you’re working with. Run your suggested framework and tagging structure past them. Are they happy with the way you suggest tagging the source, the medium, and the campaign?

It might be that they’ll suggest you use something else, in which case you can update your tagging template accordingly.

Share the tagging template with all of the relevant people so that they have a record of the work you’ve done. This will also allow them to observe the way you’ve suggested the business tags Google Products and Google Posts (if relevant) moving forwards.

Top Tips for UTM Tags

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—consistency is key.

It’s better to spend hours carefully planning out your tagging structure—and checking with everyone concerned that your suggestions will make sense for the business—than it is to spend days unpicking borked data.

The following tips will help you to be consistent with your UTM tagging!

Use Lowercase

Google Analytics is case sensitive in all of its reports. This means that the same names with different cases will appear in reports as separate entries.

I’d stick with lower case for simplicity. You don’t want your campaigns showing up separately if you mix and match upper case for your tags:

Source: holini

Make Your UTM Parameters Easy to Read

Decide how you’ll separate your words when a parameter has multiple parts.

For example, from the below, which campaign name reads best?

utm_campaign=girafferidinglessonsforkids

OR

utm_campaign=giraffe-riding-lessons-for-kids

Personally, I like to use a dash to separate words in the parts of the parameter that I’m populating. The other options are to use an underscore, or to use the ‘+’ sign, which will create a space between the words when viewed in GA.

Don’t Get Your Source and Medium in a Muddle

A UTM code enables us to identify the source, medium, and campaign that a website visit comes from.

Think of the trajectory of the visitor from the link click in GBP through to your website as a journey.

The source is where the journey starts. The medium is the method of transport. Also, I think of the campaign as the seat or the carriage on that method of transport. When you incorporate all three of these dimensions, you’ll get a unique travel story.

If you get the source and the medium mixed up, the traffic from your tagged URL is going to end up in the ‘other’ bucket in GA, and that’s very sad.

How you label your medium will determine which bucket your data sits in. I always choose ‘organic’ as this is the default channel definition that I want my GBP traffic attributed to.

For ‘source’ I use ‘google’, but other examples of UTM tagging for GBP might recommend you use ‘local’ or something else. Whatever you choose, be consistent and make sure that it doesn’t mess with your data and reporting!

You *can* change the default channel groupings in Google Analytics so that you can tag GBP traffic with a medium of your choice. This enables you to tell Google that you want this included as ‘organic’. However, if you’re managing the data for an external organization, then don’t fiddle with any settings that might mess with the data someone else is using!

Watch out for ‘?’ in URLs

UTM tags typically have a ‘?’ before the first query parameter, such as:

www.awesomedonutsnearme.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_term=gbp-listing

If the URL you’re tagging already includes a question mark, you’ll need to swap out the ‘?’ at the start of your UTM tag for an ampersand instead:

www.awesomedonutsnearme.com/jsp/content.jsp?st=long_street&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_term=gbp-listing

UTMs for Google Business Profile URLs

As I already mentioned, I’m using ‘google’ for the source and ‘organic’ for the medium.

I’m using the ‘campaign’ field to differentiate between the purpose of the GBP URLs, and the ‘campaign content’ field to differentiate between the locations.

Source: google

Medium: organic

For the campaign field I use the location of the link in the GBP:

For the primary website URL:

Campaign: gbp-listing

For the menu URL:

Campaign: gbp-menu

For the appointment URL:

Campaign: gbp-appt

For the place an order URL:

Campaign: gbp-order

Since the ‘campaign content’ field is used to specify your locations, I’d advise choosing the store codes you’re using for your locations in the location group. Ideally, these will be descriptive and UTM-friendly:

This is another chance to think about the reporting and data requirements of the organization.

What unique identifiers do you need to include in the campaign content field to answer questions like:

• Do locations in a particular geographic area get more calls than others?
• Do locations in a particular geographic area generate more online revenue via GBP than others?
• Do locations under a particular type of management (for example franchise versus non-franchise) perform better than other types?

The Multi-Location Challenge

Multi-location businesses face a number of unique challenges, and UTM tagging is no different!

Issues of Google UTM scalability

In my other UTM tagging template, I explain how to tag your Google Products.

Google states that Products Editor is for small and medium-sized businesses. The product listings have to be manually curated in the GBP dashboard—therefore they’re not a great choice for bigger businesses or those with multiple business listings. Google, of course, wants larger businesses to provide data about their products via Local Inventory Ads (quelle surprise!).

I’ve seen some multi-location businesses manually curating GBP products, but they’re few and far between. These businesses aren’t really the audience for this feature, so you won’t find a tagging framework on the BrightLocal tagging template.

Posts are another sticking point for multi-location businesses. Google now allows chains (usually defined as businesses with ten or more locations that share the same name) to create Google Posts via the API and publish them across all locations. So, multi-location businesses can create a Post and push it out to all of their business listings.

Because it’s only possible to post in bulk via the API—and not via the GBP dashboard—businesses usually manage this using a third-party tool, such as Uberall. This is why we haven’t included a section on Post tagging in our template.

Listings Management Platforms

Businesses with several locations *can* update their GBPs via the dashboard using bulk location management. However, if these businesses need to make frequent changes to their listings, they’ll likely manage this using a third-party solution.

If this is the case for your business, or your client’s business, you’ll surely have a few questions for that vendor, such as:

• Does the third-party solution allow you to add UTM tagging to GBP URLs?
• Can UTM tagging be custom or does it need to be a specific format?
• Does it allow you to tag all URLs in GBP, not just the primary website link?
• Does it allow your business to make Google Posts in bulk? And if so, can they also be custom tagged?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to see if the template that we’ve put together, or the tagging framework you put together with the reporting manager, is viable within that platform.

If you’re using listings management, don’t be tempted to add UTM tagged URLs via bulk upload in the GBP dashboard. These will only stick through to the next time the third-party platform pushes the data they hold for your listings back into the API.

Ever read any of the ‘Google keeps stripping the tags off of my website link’ posts on the Google Support Forum? This is likely the cause of many of those problems.

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Claire—Show Me the Template!

Okay, OK! Here’s the BrightLocal Multi-location UTM tagging template! Remember to make your own copy, change the name, and then add in your own unique URLs.

Here’s a run down of the tabs in the template and who they’re for!

For all businesses:

START HERE—read this sheet first, and follow the instructions.

Your Locations—this is where you’ll populate the important data you’ll need for each of your locations. I’ve given you one example, use this to put together a MASTER list.

*TOP TIP* When you’ve finished, put all of the URLs you’ve entered through a crawler of some description (Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) and check they all give a 200 status code with no redirects.

Primary Links—generates the primary links for your locations.

For some businesses (depends on primary category):

Appt Links

Menu Links

Place an Order Links

Reserve a Table Link

Next Steps

Right. You have your Google UTM tagged links which have been signed off by your data and reporting lead. They’ve been put together with an understanding of the opportunities and limitations of the structure offered by your third-party listing provider, if you have one.

Hooray you!

If you’re using a third-party platform that’s going to update these URLs via the API, then you’ll need to liaise with that provider about how you communicate the new URLs to them. This will most likely be via a master spreadsheet.

If you’re using the bulk management function within GBP Manager, you can download your business data, update the URLs in the sheet with the ones that you’ve generated using the template, and then ‘import businesses’ back into the location group.

Monitor your listings to check on these URLs as they get updated and start showing in the places where your GBP features, such as Search and Maps. 

Google should update your URLs quickly, so check back in a couple of hours to see if your edits have gone live.

Final Words of Caution

This guide is based on the premise that you’ll be changing pre-existing URLs purely by adding parameters, and in some cases adding new URLs in fields where you hadn’t previously had URLs. The domain itself needs to remain unchanged.

Changing the domain to something different than the domain that was used for bulk verification is a big NO-NO and will likely result in suspension.

Try a bulk update with a test set of about 20 at first to check that all changes go smoothly and that none of your changes are triggering any issues.

Once you’ve tagged your URLs with UTM codes, you can start collecting and analyzing the data in GA and GSC!

Google is constantly adding to, tweaking, monetizing, and retiring features, and there are many factors that are going to affect GBP performance—be that from a ranking or a conversion perspective.

As local marketers, we need to be monitoring our Google Business Profiles so that we can check the progress or quality over a period of time. We also need to make sure we have a process for systematic review and optimization so that we can see what’s working and what isn’t. Monitoring the search landscape is also essential so that we’re aware of any new opportunities and challenges.

Based on my recent talk at LocalU Advanced, this guide will walk you through ten pieces of the GBP puzzle (there are of course many more!) that can and should be monitored for potential optimization. I’ll also share my Google Business Profile monitoring template—read on for access to this!

Why ‘Setting and Forgetting’ Isn’t an Option

There are a number of reasons why Google Business Profiles require ongoing attention and optimization:

• Changes to the appearance of local search results;
• Changes to the way buyers search and make choices;
• Changes to GBP features; and
• Interactivity and user-generated content (UGC).

Changes to the Appearance of Local Search Results

Mary Bowling created this image to show changes to the appearance of local search results over the years:

It shows how the Local Pack looked from 2007 through to 2015. As you can see, the 7-Pack settled into a 3-Pack in 2015.

We’re now used to seeing three results in the Map Pack, but more recently we’re seeing Google using huge maps, as well as a 5-Pack for some queries:

There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years around ‘Google as your new home page’. This concept has grown as Google continues to tweak and add new functionality designed to keep users on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is largely achieved by presenting the user with more and more opportunities to interact with a business without actually needing to click through to its website.

Changes to the Way Buyers Search and Make Choices

Like any good marketer, we should all be concerned about how customers and potential customers make purchase decisions. We need to stay on top of how world events, technology, and other factors affect the way consumers search and are influenced in their decision-making processes.

We know that mobile phone use has massively shifted search behavior, user expectation, and the way that results are presented. As marketers, we’ve had to take this into account as we plan and implement our strategies.

Voice and Visual Search

Voice search was the hot topic for a while, but optimizing for voice search ended up not really changing much about the way local search marketers operate.

What will come next and what will this mean for us? Maybe visual search will shake things up a bit!

We’re all familiar with how Google makes sense of our written content and schema to serve what it hopes will be relevant results for the searcher’s intent. But we’re not so familiar with the level of processing that Google uses to make sense of our images. Consumers can increasingly use visual search to find the products that they want to research and buy.

The below image demonstrates how using Google Lens to search for a product triggers a 3-Pack:

World events have a huge effect on the way we search and the types of phrases that we use. We need to keep abreast of these changes and make sure that they’re reflected in the words and images that we use to describe our businesses. This starts with our websites and our GBPs.

Changes to Google Business Profile Features

Covid-19 prompted a huge shake-up for GBP in terms of new features. Historically, Google wasn’t quick to respond to the requests for new business features. But the pandemic showed just how efficiently Google can launch useful new features.

Many of the new additions provided during the early days of the pandemic are still available for businesses to use today, and may become permanent. These features include Covid-19 Posts, health and safety attributes, being able to mark a business as temporarily closed, and ‘More hours’.

Google continues to surprise us with new GBP features, often without any explanation or fanfare. You’ll likely only notice these updates because of a change in the dashboard or because someone tweets to ask if something is new. You might simply notice that something that used to work no longer does.

Google frequently retires features and sends them to the graveyard, for example, short names.

Interactivity and User-generated Content

A high level of interactivity and UGC is presented in local search results. We don’t control all of the content that appears here, so we need to monitor and optimize everything that’s making an appearance

We’re all very familiar with reviews and understand the importance of reviews for Google Business Profiles. Another user-generated feature that’s less well known is Q&A. Businesses still seem to largely be ignoring it, while users continue to ask and answer questions.

Google messaging is available for many businesses, and it’s increasingly easy for businesses to manage messages via the dashboard or through a third-party provider.

A recent change to the Google Maps app now means that users can add their own photos and comments to the ‘updates’ tab. This has traditionally been an area that only businesses themselves could manage through the use of Google Posts.

Confused about any of the above? Don’t panic—I’ve got your back! Let’s crack on with those ten points for monitoring Google Business Profile.

1. Monitor the SERPs

We need to keep a close eye on the SERPs and ask ourselves the following questions:

• How does my Google Business Profile look in Search?
• How does my Google Business Profile look in the 3-Pack?
• How does my Google Business Profile look in the Local Finder?
• What about my competitors—do they look just as (or more) awesome as me in all of these places?

In the same way that you’d check the responsiveness of a website across different devices and platforms, you need to check how your GBP presents across devices and platforms. You can do this by looking at the following:

• Branded search
• Non-branded search
• Map Pack
• Local Finder
• Google Maps
• Desktop
• Mobile
• Various operating systems
• Various locations

You’re likely now asking yourself, “how can I do this?”

You could do this manually. This would involve making a checklist of the phrases you’re ranking for and where, but you’ll likely run into location and device issues. This method is also going to be hard to scale if you have multiple businesses and locations.

I suggest automating the process using different tools.

BrightLocal’s Local Rank Tracker will check your rankings and keep a SERP screenshot of the results for desktop and mobile, and for Google Maps on desktop:

BrightLocal’s Local Search Grid report will give you a screenshot of the Local Finder results for your search query:

This data can be pulled for the same search query across as many locations as you specify. For example, you can see data from 225 locations if you have a 15 by 15 grid.

I also like to automate this process using Mobile Moxie’s SERP Datalyser. This tool is fantastic for monitoring data across a range of locations and is useful for recognizing disambiguation when you search on a branded term. For example, when your client says ‘I’m seeing my business profile in the top results’ and you need to explain it’s because they’re sitting in their actual location searching for their own business.

2. Monitor the ‘Search Landscape’

Next, we need to monitor the ‘search landscape’. By landscape, I mean the things that affect what we search for, how we search, how the search results look, and how this relates back to us in our jobs as local search marketers

Think with Google is a great place to read about Google’s coverage of research on consumer trends, consumer journeys, retail, and new Google features.

There are some brilliant resources out there to learn about local SEO, such as the Bright Ideas hub. And Sterling Sky has an excellent timeline for staying on top of Google Business Profile changes and SERP features testing.

Brodie Clark (if you don’t already know him) is an avid watcher of and commentator on SERP features—so his new timeline for search feature changes is a must-read. In terms of quickly dipping into search news to check if there’s anything you’ve missed, the tl;dr marketing timeline newsletter is pretty awesome.

If you have the time to go ‘all in’ on learning all things local, I’ve put together a list of people to follow on Twitter, plus podcasts, newsletters, and other resources for local search marketers.

3. Let Google Know You Want All Notifications

We need to let Google know that we want to be told when something happens on our GBPs.

When it comes to Google notifying you that you have things to attend to on your business profile, the notifications landscape feels pretty fragmented.

Email Notification Settings in Google Business Profile Manager

First, on a desktop in Google Business Profile Manager, you can let Google know that you’d like to receive email notifications for certain events. For example, a new Q&A, someone making a booking, or someone messaging your business:

Message Notifications in Chrome on Desktop

You can also get notifications on Chrome if you tweak your Chrome settings to enable push notifications:

Use a Third-party Tool or Automate the Process Using the API

If you’re managing notifications at scale, you’ll likely want to use a third-party solution or get someone to build something for you using the GBP API.

4. Measure Using UTM Tracking

I’m always getting questions from my clients about how Google Business Profile is performing. They want to know:

• What’s working?
• What isn’t?
• What features are driving traffic?
• What features are driving traffic that converts?
• What happens to my conversions when Google moves a feature in, out, up, or down the business profile or the Local Finder?

Google Business Profile Insights give us some useful data about how people interact with our business profiles:

But these insights don’t tell us the full story of how many people a Google Business Profile refers to the business website, and what those people do when they get there.

And that’s where UTM tagging comes in. If you haven’t already set up UTM tagging on your profile, then I wrote a post about it that includes a handy UTM template that’ll tag your links up for you.

Without UTM tagging, traffic from GBP will show in Google Analytics as either organic or direct. Even when it does get attributed to the organic channel, we have no idea which part of the Google Business Profile that visitor came from.

UTM tagging allows us to see revenue attributable to GBP, broken down into which parts of GBP are delivering that revenue, as well as the types of conversions that GBP is driving.

If you’re yet to set up UTM tagging, this video will outline the process and explain more of the benefits.

5. Monitor and Plan for Local Search Justifications

Justifications aren’t a new thing—we’re used to seeing the relevant bolded words in meta descriptions in the SERPs and elsewhere. If you’re not au fait with Local SEO justifications then this Google Business Profile justifications guide by Joy Hawkins will teach you all you need to know.

We all know that search engines operate on a basis of relevance, and their prime aim—besides making money for themselves—is to serve relevant results to the user. For local search, justifications are just another way of highlighting the relevance of that result to the user.

Local justifications make a result stand out, ensuring the relevance of the result is immediately apparent and no doubt influencing click through rate.

I don’t think anyone has done any research on review justifications, but plenty of tests have been done on other rich features, such as how product schema positively affects click-through rate. I’d imagine that local search justifications would produce similar results.

How to Monitor and Optimize for Justification Opportunities

Use Google Search Console to see search queries that your Google Business Profile is appearing for. If you’re UTM tagging your URLs, then you’ll be able to see search data for the non-branded queries that are triggering Map Pack results that you feature in.

Look at data for the last 16 months for queries that don’t include the branded term. In the example below, I’ve applied a page filter so that only data from UTM tagged URLs is shown. You can see the URLs below—it’s the primary website link, the appointment link, and a GBP offer post:

Clicking on the ‘queries’ tab will show you the queries:

Google Business Profile Insights data is a goldmine for finding the types of keywords that could be triggering justifications. A lot of people overlook GBP insights query data—make sure you’re not one of them!

You need to go beyond the core terms and keywords that you’ve targeted once you’ve performed your keyword research. Ask yourself, what are the keyword modifiers that people are likely to use when searching for a product or service that you offer? We’re all familiar with location modifiers but don’t forget all of the others, such as:

• Time modifiers, such as the year or season;
• Buy modifiers, such as ‘cheap’, ‘luxury’, ‘sale’, or ‘offer’;
• Owner modifiers, such as ‘black-owned’ or ‘woman-owned’; and
• Audience modifiers, such as ‘for children’ or ‘wheelchair accessible’.

Attributes can also give us a clue about what people search for and the things that are important to them when they’re making a purchase decision. Check your GBP attributes to see which ones are available for your listing:

This resource by Krystal Taing runs through the entire list of attributes available in GBP for a range of business types. This can give you a clue as to what Google determines to be important for searchers.

For additional clues about modifiers, take a look at what Google is asking about the business via ‘Know This Place‘:

Finally, take a look at the review attributes for your business and competitor businesses. This will provide further clues about what’s important to searchers within your niche.

Once you’ve got your group of local keywords, you can map them out across the sources of justifications. I suggest starting with the ones that are easiest to influence:

• Website justifications;
• Post justifications, including offer posts;
• Services justifications; and
• Review justifications.

6. Photos

They say that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and we’re all aware that we exist in a very visual internet culture. We curate our images based on what we want people to think about us—both professionally and personally.

So, why do we allow things like this to happen to our business listings?

We all know that we should be updating our websites with current and correct information, and we should be doing the same with Google Business Profile. After all, GBP is often what people will see before—and in many cases instead—of clicking through to the website.

Monitor Customer-uploaded Images

You need to monitor your customer-uploaded images. You can sort by date to see the newest ones first:

If any of those images contravene Google’s photo and video guidelines you can flag them for removal.

Users are also prompted to add photos and comments in the Google Maps app, which then appears in the ‘updates’ tab:

This is what that looks like in the Google Maps app:

Businesses need to monitor this from within the app itself. This involves checking images and comments, and writing responses.

Business-uploaded Images

All businesses need to carefully curate and optimize their own images. Ask yourself:

• Do your images reflect the products and services you currently offer?
• Do the images of your staff reflect how they currently look?
• Do your images reflect the season?
• Are you monitoring your images regularly?
• Do you have a schedule for image uploads?

The image that accompanies your listing in the Local Finder won’t always be your cover photo. Google will often serve what it considers to be the most relevant image alongside the written results in the local SERPs.

Look at the A5 oak and pine listing that shows a photo of a table, for the search term “oak table near me”:

Google judged this photo to be more relevant to the search query than this business cover photo, and used it in the search results accordingly. Avoid this by making sure you have good quality images of your important products and services.

Monitoring Google Business Profile Cover Photos

I use Mobile Moxie to monitor Google Business Profile images from a number of different locations. This lets me know when a change has been made:

This image isn’t being populated via GBP, it’s being populated by image search. So the moral of the story is that you need to monitor the main image from your business profile and test it across the devices and locations that are important to you.

7. Google Business Profile Products

Google Business Profile Products allows businesses that don’t have the ability to integrate product feeds via Google Merchant Center to add their product inventory manually.

Access depends on the listings primary category, with the following business types being ineligible:

• Alcohol
• Guns
• Cannabis
• Adult entertainment

If you’re yet to set up Google Business Profile Products, then this is a useful guide.

I really like GBP Products because visually they can make your profile stand out. They take up a load of real estate and they can include a link to your website:

Because GBP products are manually curated, they’re rarely one and done. It’s likely that price, availability, URL, features, and images are subject to change.

It’s best to choose evergreen products that are important to the business but that don’t change or go out of stock often

I’ve created this Google sheet—just make a copy and populate it with the details of your products, including the URL. The sheet will then automatically tag up your GBP URLs with UTM tagging. You then just need to go ahead and copy and paste the details of your products into your Google Business Profile.

Now you have a master copy in case you have any issues further down the line, or if multiple people have responsibility for managing GBP products in your organization.

8. Google Business Profile Services

We need to monitor the often overlooked ‘services’ in our business profiles.

The services section is often forgotten because it’s only viewable on mobile. It’s difficult to know how customers and potential customers consume this content, and unlike GBP products, services aren’t linked to your website.

I’m paying more attention to services than I used to, mainly because I’m seeing them pulled in as justifications for my clients. The ‘provides’ justification is populated from GBP services for that business, and I’m seeing a lot of services justifications in the SERPs I monitor.

Services can be a bit of a pain because Google is continually scraping content and throwing it into the GBP services section. You need to monitor and optimize this regularly and delete the changes that Google has made if they’re not accurate.

Also, be mindful of the wording used in the services section. If these services are being pulled through into a 3-Pack as a justification, you’ll want the words to be descriptive and compelling, and to make sense!

I’ve added a ‘services’ tab to the products spreadsheet I mentioned above, so do check it out!

It’s important to keep a master record of your services and the copy you’ve written for this section, especially if you’re having to constantly make revisions when Google keeps updating and changing it!

9. Q&A

You’ll hopefully be using Q&A to its full potential because you’re a savvy local marketer, but the number of high-profile businesses I see who don’t monitor Q&A is pretty alarming. If you’re not au fait with Q&A, then this guide will fill you in on the deets.

Get Notified About New Questions and Answers

You’ll want to know when someone asks a new question, so let Google know that you’re interested in new questions and answers in your settings:

Monitor via Third-party Tools

You can monitor Q&A manually using notifications, or you can use a range of free or paid tools to monitor and to respond. I’ve used both GatherUp and Postamatic for this.

Like most user-generated content, there are Google guidelines that must be adhered to. If you think a question violates these terms, then you can flag it and state why you’re reporting it. I’ve reported a few and they’ve been removed quickly.

Common Q&A

To save yourself time, I suggest putting together a common Q&A sheet. This means that when you need to respond, you have a pro forma answer that you can tweak as required.

10. Monitoring Schedule

And finally—number 10! You need to put together a Google Business Profile monitoring schedule for your business or the businesses that you work with.

Monitoring Checklist

You’ll need to attend to all of the things we’ve talked about today, as well as all of the other important moving parts of Google Business Profile. Consider:

• Who will stay on top of learning all of the things?
• What else needs monitoring (reviews, messaging, measurement, posts etc)?
• What’s your internal resource?
• Who will monitor?
• How will they monitor (tool usage etc)
• How often will they monitor?

To help you with your monitoring schedule, I’ve put together another resource to make your lives easier. This one includes a range of monitoring tasks along with a suggested frequency:

Work with your team to allocate resources, agree on the frequency, and add any other Google Business Profile monitoring tasks to determine future optimization tasks—good luck!

It’s not just a question of knowing where to look to access the most useful data, but how to interpret it and use that insight to plot a suitable course of action. 

Google Business Profile Performance Insights (formerly known as Google My Business Insights) offers an easy place to start. It provides accessible analytics that gives information on your search presence. Plus,  useful metrics that demonstrate how often customers and potential customers are taking action on your listing that might lead to a conversion.

What are Google Business Profile Insights?

Google Business Profile Performance shows you data related to your local search performance such as:

• the number of views your listing has received
• what search queries triggered an impression of your listing
• the types of interaction searchers have had with your listing (clicking through to your website, calling you, or requesting directions for example) 

As GBP Performance metrics are focused entirely on your Google Business Profile and the actions that searchers can take on the profile, it differs from Search Console and Google Analytics.

• Search Console allows you to monitor and maintain your site in search, along with troubleshooting potential problems.
• Google Analytics is the most comprehensive of the trio. It offers extensive data from all of your online marketing activity, plus comprehensive reports and data modeling.

Getting Started with Google Analytics 4 for Local SEO

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How do I access Google Business Profile Performance Insights?

Whether you access insights via the NMX (New Merchant Experience) or the bulk download option you have the option to view/download up to 6 months of data.

Single locations

Single locations will probably find it easiest to access their GBP Performance data via the NMX:

Click on ‘Performance’ and then you’ll be able to choose your time frame:

Multiple Locations: Access Insights in Bulk

You can bulk download Insights for multiple profiles to a spreadsheet. Then you can view how different chain locations are performing on Google Search and Maps.

To do this:

1. Sign in at https://business.google.com/

2. Select the location that you wish to download the insights for.

3. Click on ‘insights’ in the drop-down menu under ‘actions’:

4. You’ll see the following screen, where you can choose your time frame.

If you’d like to see a sample of the Google Business Profile insights metrics that can be downloaded in the bulk report you can see a sample that we have added to a Google Sheet here.

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Show Me the Metrics

As with any metric, in any platform, it’s worthwhile knowing where they come from. This can help give you a sense of how this thing is actually measured. Google gives an overview of the metrics and how they are calculated here and here. 

It’s always important to compare like for like when you’re using metrics to assess your business performance. So, be aware of when and if Google changes the way that they measure. You must be sure that you’re not drawing conclusions based on comparisons of metrics that have been collected in very different ways!

If you’ve had a Google Business Profile for a while you might know that Google deprecated a number of metrics in early 2023. So, if something is missing, it may be worth checking the list of sunsetted metrics.

What do the metrics actually mean?

Now, we know where the metrics actually come from. Next, we’ll want to explore the question ‘What does this actually tell me about how my business is performing’?

Business Profile Interactions

These metrics are great at indicating how engaging searchers are finding your profile. 

Things to look out for:

• Is the total going up or down? 
• Do the totals reflect what you would expect to see in view of the seasonality of your business?

Note also that the interface will only give you data for a whole month. Keep this in mind if you are comparing the data part way through a month.

You’ll see a number of tabs along the top of the dashboard. Below, we’ll cover what each of these actually shows.

Overview

This is what you’d expect. It shows the total number of interactions, per month, with your business profile.

Calls

This tab shows the total number of calls to a business made by people clicking ‘call’ on a business profile. Again, these are monthly totals.

Messages

You’ll have to have enabled messaging on your profile to get this metric.

This dashboard shows you the number of people who have clicked ‘message’ on your business profile and information on responses.

Google Business Profile Performance Insights also gives you the message response rate and average response time. 

You’ll need to monitor these to ensure you’re giving your potential customers the best messaging experience.

Bookings

This tab shows you the number of bookings made directly through your business profile.

You have to be working with a third-party booking provider that has an integration with Google Business Profile to see this data.

Directions

The directions tab shows how many searchers requested directions to your location via your business profile.

Website clicks

If you have your website linked from your business profile, as you should, this metric will tell you how many people clicked through to it.

How Your Products Performed

If you have added Google Products to your business listing you’ll want to know whether people are actually looking at them. 

This tab will tell you exactly that, as well as the ones that perform the best.

If you have ‘Google Products’ in your Google Business Profile you’ll find some data here:

Product views show how many people saw your products on Google Search or Maps.

How People Discovered You

If you want to answer a question like “Do more people find me on a mobile or on a desktop?” then this one is for you.

This will break down the platform and device that people have visited you from.

This section shows you how many unique visitors viewed your profile, plus the type of device and platform that they used.

In this section you can also check what queries people are using to find your business profile in the first place.

You can click on ‘see more’ for a more comprehensive list.

This section shows the terms that people used that returned your profile in results. This data is useful for your keyword research, so don’t forget to check back on this regularly!