The big news in the Local Search community three weeks ago was Google’s announcement of the availability of the Google My Business (GMB) Insights data via the GMB API. Today, we’re excited to announce support for GMB Insights data in Moz Local!
- Learn how customers are searching for your business on Google and the actions they are taking once they find it
- Easily visualize and filter results by region, a specific client, or a specific campaign — on the fly
- Measure conversion rates for your local marketing campaigns
Now available: Google My Business Insights
Starting today, customers using Moz Local Professional or Moz Local Premium have the ability to work with GMB Insights data. The information in Google My Business Insights helps you understand how prospects are searching for your business on Google, and the actions they are taking once they find it. For example, having found your business in a local search, are they taking the next step — clicking or tapping to request driving directions, calling your location, or visiting your website? Understanding consumer behavior through insights like these can help you optimize your business listings to drive peak performance in consumer local searches. This is important because it now enables you to measure actual conversion rates, and in turn measure the success of your local marketing campaigns.
As the SEO leader, we’ve given Moz Local the powerful ability to instantaneously aggregate metrics for a set of locations, and present that in a way that’s intuitive to users. For brands and agencies that need to dive into their metrics across many locations, Moz Local’s performance and flexibility unlock tremendous business value in the data. Let’s say you want to see how many click-to-calls occurred to your stores within a specific region, or click-for-directions to all of your stores occurred within a specific campaign. Moz Local lets you easily answer questions like this, filtering down to a region, a specific client, or a specific campaign on the fly, and see totals for any of these breakdowns.
Getting answers to questions like these are among the highest priorities that most brands — and agencies on their behalf — have in their local marketing. The big story this allows a brand marketer to tell goes something like this: “After launching our local campaign, we increased Click-to-Calls on Google by 25%." For an agency, it’s similar: “After signing on with us, requests for driving directions to all of your locations increased by 20%.”
We commend the GMB and GMB API teams for the pace of improvements and getting at the heart of a real customer pain point. It’s very exciting to see Google invest time and effort in an area of growing importance to enterprises, local businesses, and agencies large and small.
Visualizing GMB Insights
So what does this look like in Moz Local? Well, beginning today, here’s what you can expect to see for Professional and Premium listings:
Moz Local now provides these Google My Business insights:
- Google Searches – The number of times your business listing was shown when searching for it directly (by name)
- Google Categorical Searches – The number of times the listing was shown as a result of a categorical search (for example, restaurant)
- Google Map Views – The number of times your listing was viewed on Google Maps
- Google Search Views – The number of times your listing was viewed on Google Search (in organic or local pack SERPs)
- Google Customer Actions, which include:
- Click-to-Website – The number of times the website was clicked or tapped on your listing
- Click-to-Call – The number of times the phone number was clicked or tapped on your listing
- Click-to-Driving Directions – The number of times driving directions were requested for the listing
It’s easy!
Getting at this new data is simple: As soon as you have Moz Local sync your locations with Google My Business, it will start fetching metrics from Google My Business. That’s it!
Our next data destination: Yelp
We’re excited to see the insights that our customers will be able to distill from the metrics gathered from Google My Business in Moz Local. However, our path toward data nirvana doesn’t end here. Once our Yelp integration is complete and available, as soon as customers manage their Yelp locations via Moz Local, we’ll also be able to share similar metrics from Yelp alongside the Google My Business metrics. For many customers, this will be the first time they'll be able to see these two incredibly critical data sources side-by-side for their locations.
We’re working closely with our friends at Yelp to complete the Moz Local-Yelp integration, so stay tuned.
Get started today!
Google My Business Insights data is now available to customers using our Professional and Premium packages. For the growing number of companies and agencies currently evaluating Moz Local, please ask your Moz representative for a demo. And, of course, let us know what you think!
It will be a funny shout but yeah I can say, wow! what a great solution it is. Being new in SEO world I always used to be tensed when it comes to learning about Analytics but now I think there is no need to worry about Google Analytics tool either I know about that or not because I can track all detail of GMB listing quite easily. The only concern is that there are also some other popular business listing sites but you have discussed only GMB and Yelp. Would love to know about others also. Well very very helpful post as always but unique.
@Pratibha That's an excellent question. There are two good reasons why we've focused on Google and Yelp. First, the vast majority of customer discovery comes from those two sources at least in the US. It's certainly not the complete picture, but directionally it is where the customer should be focused. Second, we're happy to integrate other directories and search engines metrics, but the majority of the properties do not expose that data. Hope that helps.
Hey Dudley,
Thanks for your polite response.
Hi Dudley,
A great post! Google Analytics, at least for me, is essential for any website that you value. You can see not only where visitors are coming, the bounce rate and URL destination (that the visitors tend to go). Hopefully in the near future, there will be a way to specify date ranges so you can analyse the graph closer and see it in more detail for specific times and dates, rather than all the data you have on one graph.
Very interesting.
I like GMB display and it seems very usefull, i like more than google my places.
Thanks a lot.
Will this go beyond the 90 day history limitation that's currently in Google My Business? Because it would be extremely valuable to be able to see GMB info as far back as Analytics info can go choosing custom date ranges etc.
This is a good new feature. I only wish that the base module performed as advertised. Help desk can still not get Factual or Acxiom to update and keep saying, "...it needs more time...or in due time". Well it's been six months or more and several requests to no avail. I can't see how this feature will help if Moz Local cannot get the base platform correct. I know this is probably not the right post or forum to express this, but I cannot get any traction anywhere else.
I think it will help more to take decisions business wise as we more matrix on that we can analyze more stuff and proceed accordingly. Now we can track more about our listing and optimize it in a better way so that we can generate more potential clients through local searches.
The GMB Metrics API exposes up to 18 months of data. So, yes, we'll be able to expose all the data we're able to collect from the API. The current implementation doesn't include specifying date ranges, but that's in-progress.
This is interesting. We always need to boost our businesses, right? I'm very bad in analytics, though, but I will have a look for my personal adviser's business. Thank you!
It's exciting to see you taking advantage of the new GMB API features so quickly. However, the other blog post today discredits some of the data we are seeing from GSC. I think that likely extends to "we should be wary of GMB data".
Just food for thougut. It's definitely still nice to have the data in an easy to digest format all in one place, regardless of your perception of how accurate the data is.
Thanks for highlighting this tool. Good for tracking.
One thing that would really allow us to measure the listing's performance is to store the previous data and get historical data before for now, we can't go beyond the past 90 days and local search efforts usually take longer. I wished GMB insights would work like Google Analytics.
Yeh, these is really one of the best solution for SEO Startups & Beginners. In today era analytics is must be needed while you add any site or listing it any where so it would be great to use it.
Thanks for these awesome post..
Cheers guys - great post describing the feature!
This is cool stuff! I like GMB’s user-friendly display. It’s excellent for SEO beginners and new startups. Thanks for the post, Dudley.
Great post Dudley. Very informative and knowledgeable points you discuss in this post. You cover all the point very carefully. I like your post. Awesome.
Thank you Eric for sharing your experience. I just have one concern. Don’t you think that paid local reviews will have negative effect.