What Is Google Business Profile Insights?
It is called the performance report now. The rename was a rebuild rather than a relabel. Several figures you may remember have gone entirely. This guide covers what the report shows today, what it cannot tell you and what to change as a result.
It Has Been Renamed And Rebuilt
If you are hunting for Insights, it no longer exists under that name. The reporting was retired and replaced by the performance report, reached through your own listing while signed in. Crucially, this was a rebuild rather than a relabel, so some of the numbers people remember were removed at the same time.
What still exists. The useful part.
How many people saw the listing, what they did next and which searches brought them. That is the core of it and it is enough to work with.
What went. Three things worth knowing about.
Photo metrics, the device breakdown and the old breakdown of how customers searched for your business. Any guide still discussing those is describing a screen nobody can open.
Why so much advice is out of date. The old name has the demand.
Most people still search for Insights, so plenty of published guidance was written for the old report and never revisited. That mismatch is the single biggest source of confusion here.
One requirement worth stating. Verification.
Google states that performance data is available only for verified profiles. If you are seeing nothing at all, that is the first thing to check rather than the reporting itself.
What The Report Actually Shows
Three kinds of information, which is a more useful way to hold it than a list of fields, since the fields move. Reach, behaviour and demand.
Reach. How many people saw you.
Views, split between Search and Maps. Most businesses get considerably more from Search, which surprises people who think of the listing as a maps feature.
Behaviour. What they did next.
Calls, direction requests, website clicks and messages where you have it enabled. These are the actions that turn into work, which makes them the numbers that matter commercially.
Demand. What they searched.
The terms that brought your listing up, with how often each appeared. This is the most underused part of the report and the one block eight is about.
How current it is. Not live.
Google states that the searches metric updates at the start of each month and can take a few days to appear. Treat this as a monthly report rather than a dashboard to check on a Tuesday.
What The Numbers Mean
The definitions matter more than the totals, because a number counted differently from how you assume produces the wrong conclusion. One change in particular explains most of the alarm about this report.
Views count people rather than appearances. The big one.
Google states that views count unique visitors, with a person counted once a day even if they look several times across Search and Maps. So the figure describes how many people, not how many times.
Which is why yours may have fallen. Without anything changing.
Businesses comparing today's views against figures from the old report are comparing two different measurements. Google also states the number can be lower than the one shown in notification emails.
Actions are the real measure. Not views.
A call is somebody choosing you. A view is somebody glancing at you. If you only look at one thing in this report, look at the actions.
Searches are impressions rather than people. Different unit again.
The queries section shows how often your listing came up for a term, which is a measure of demand and visibility rather than of individuals.
The Limits Nobody Mentions
This report is free, useful and considerably less precise than it looks. Knowing where it is soft stops you making decisions the data cannot support.
The history is short. Months rather than years.
The window runs to roughly six months, which makes year on year comparison impossible from inside the report. For a seasonal trade that is the comparison that actually matters.
Some figures are rounded or estimated. Treat them as directional.
These are indicative numbers rather than an audited ledger. Reading a small movement between months as a trend is reading noise.
It is not comparable with website analytics. Different definitions.
Profile views and website sessions count different things in different ways, so putting them side by side produces an argument rather than an answer. Our measuring performance material covers that properly.
Calls are undercounted. Worth knowing.
The call figure counts taps on the number from the listing. Somebody who reads your number and dials it manually does not appear. Nor does anybody ringing later from their call history. Tracking calls covers that gap.
Export It Before It Disappears
The window rolls, so the months at the back drop off permanently. A business wanting to know how this January compared with last January has to have kept its own record, because the report will not have it.
What to do. Download it monthly.
Once a month, export the figures and keep them somewhere dull and permanent. It takes minutes and it cannot be done retrospectively.
What to keep alongside them. Context.
A note of what changed that month. New photographs, a category correction, a price change or a competitor opening nearby. Numbers without context explain nothing later.
Why this matters more than it sounds. Diagnosis.
When something drops in eighteen months, the only thing that will tell you whether it is unusual is your own history. Without it you are guessing about your own business.
Who this catches out. Seasonal trades.
Roofers, gardeners, heating engineers and anybody whose year has a shape. The comparison you need is the same month last year, which is exactly the one the report cannot give you.
Searches Against Views Against Actions
These three sit in an order. Where the drop off happens tells you what to fix. That is the whole method for reading this report. It takes about five minutes once you know it.
Searches. Whether there is demand.
People are looking for what you do. If this is thin, the problem is visibility or category rather than anything about how the listing reads.
Views. Whether you are being seen.
Demand exists and your listing is appearing for some of it. A gap between the two points at eligibility, distance and competition.
Actions. Whether you are being chosen.
People saw you and took a step towards becoming a customer. This is the only number that correlates with money.
Why the pattern matters more than the totals. Different problems.
A listing with few views and a listing with plenty of views and no actions have nothing in common. Treating them the same way is how businesses spend a year fixing the wrong thing.
Diagnosis By Pattern
Numbers are only worth reading if something changes as a result. So here is the practical version, being three patterns and what each one points at.
Few views at all. A visibility problem.
Points at category accuracy, completeness, verification or simply distance from where people are searching. Why a business is not showing up runs those checks in order of likelihood.
Views but no actions. The commonest pattern by far.
People are finding you and picking somebody else. That points at reviews, photographs, hours and how much information the listing carries rather than at visibility. The optimisation guide puts that work in order.
Actions falling while views hold. Something changed on the listing.
Check what was edited recently, whether hours are wrong, whether a phone number changed and whether a poor review has arrived at the top.
Everything falling at once. Check status first.
Before assuming a ranking problem, confirm the listing is not suspended and is still verified, because both produce this shape.
Branded Against Everything Else
The single most valuable question about your listing is how many people found it by searching your name against how many found it by searching what you do. The old report answered that directly. The current one does not, since that breakdown was removed in the rebuild, so it now has to be worked out from the search queries.
Why it matters. One is earned and one is not.
Somebody typing your business name already knew about you. Somebody typing your trade and their town is a new customer you won. Only the second means the work is producing anything.
How to work it out now. Sort the query list.
Look at the search terms in the report and separate the ones containing your business name from everything else. That gives you the split the old chart used to hand you.
What a name heavy listing tells you. Reputation without reach.
The business is known to the people who already know it. That is worth having and it is not growth. It is also a very common picture for established trades.
What to do about it. Category and services.
Non branded demand is won through relevance rather than through activity, which sends you back to the highest leverage fields rather than to posting more often.
What this also tells you. Which advice to ignore.
If a guide tells you to read your discovery against direct percentages, it was written for the old report. That is a useful way to date anything you read on this subject.
Where They Are Searching From
The report gives you a sense of where the people finding you actually are, including the direction requests that show where journeys start. For a business that travels, that is the closest thing you have to a map of your real reach.
What it tells you. Your true catchment.
Not the service area you typed in. The places people are genuinely finding you from, which is frequently smaller and differently shaped than the radius on the listing.
Why that is useful. It tests your assumptions.
A business convinced it covers three counties frequently discovers its listing works within a handful of miles, which is the ordinary behaviour of local results rather than a fault.
What to do with the gap. Move it to the website.
Where you want work from towns the listing does not reach, that is a website job rather than a profile setting, which our optimisation guide covers in full.
What to do with the service area. Make it credible.
If the data shows nobody from the far edge of your area ever finds you, an enormous radius is doing nothing except looking implausible to customers reading it.
Compare Against Yourself
There is no reliable competitor data in this report and no industry benchmark worth using. The comparison that tells you something is your own listing over time, which is why the export habit in block five matters.
Month length distorts everything. Start here.
February against January is three days shorter before anything else happens. Comparing calendar months manufactures declines that never occurred.
Seasonality distorts the rest. Compare like with like.
A gardener in November and a gardener in May are different businesses. The useful comparison is the same period last year, which is the one you have to have kept yourself.
What to review monthly. Actions and queries.
Whether the actions are holding and whether the non branded queries are broadening. Those two together describe whether the work is doing anything.
What not to react to. Small movements.
A change of a few percent between months is noise. Our measuring performance material owns this properly, including the point that a drop has to be established as real before anybody investigates its cause.
Where this sits in the work. Alongside everything else.
Reporting tells you where to look. The optimisation guide tells you what to do. The full series sits on the Google Business Profile guide.
A report nobody
acts on is
an expensive
screenshot.
Plenty of monthly reporting exists to demonstrate activity rather than to change anything. The only questions worth answering are whether the actions are holding, whether new customers are finding you for what you do and what we are changing this month as a result.
What we report and act on:
If your figures fell because views are now counted differently, we will tell you that rather than sell you a recovery plan.
Every guide.
One profile.
Getting set up, claiming and verifying, optimising the listing properly, suspensions and reinstatement, reviews, reading the performance data and appearing in the local pack and in Maps.
