How to Track Google My Business Traffic: Easy-To-Follow Guide

If you want your business to be discovered online, you should put your business on the leading search engine. Creating a Google My Business (GMB) account does not only help your business be discovered; it also tells you how much traffic is getting into your website and where it’s coming from.

If you’re new to Google My Business and still learning the ropes of search engine optimization, finding out who’s visiting your website and where they are from can be confusing. Don’t fret; this article is made just for you.

Google My Business Overview

A GMB profile is a straightforward tool that small businesses and large organizations use to manage their online presence over Google’s platform, including Search and Maps (Also known as Local SEO).

How it works

When a customer types” pizza near me” on their phone, GMB results immediately pop up, providing you information about pizza shops within your location, pictures, and ratings of each shop.

And if you tap on any of the shops in your search results, you’ll get more information about that store, such as directions, contact numbers, and links to its website and social channels. Most users click on the website to check out the menu.

Website clicks are the kind of traffic you want to understand. All this data tells you where your customers are coming from and what kind of sales you are getting.

Tracking your data

If you do not know how to track specific data yet, all the activities above will appear as “organic traffic’ on your Google Analytics menu. So how do you dissect the data coming at you?

It’s simple. All you have to do is open your Google My Business dashboard and create parameters called Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes that gather information about the overall efficacy of your campaign, ad, or website.

How to create UTM codes

UTM codes are parameters that you add to your URL to gather information about the overall performance and efficacy of your website, ad, or campaign. They are automatically generated when you create a new URL for the pages you want to track. Follow these steps:

Know which pages to track.

Identify the pages you want to track and drive traffic. You would want your customers to be directed to these three main pages.

• Homepage
• Contact page
• Location page(s)

Create tracking URLs

Now that you know which pages you want to track, use Google Analytics’ Campaign URL Builder and fill in the fields required. Make sure to fill in all fields correctly with the campaign builder to generate a unique URL for your campaign. Then, copy the new URL and proceed to the next step.

Update Google My Business

Login to your GMB dashboard and scroll down to find the listing you want to update. Next, find the ‘Manage Location’ tab and click ‘Info’ on the left side menu. Finally, scroll down to see your current web URL, replace it with your new one, and hit ‘Apply’ to save the changes.

Side note: A warning notification might appear on your screen to let you know that your changes are under pending review and will take three days to be published. You don’t need to worry about it as long as you are not making any drastic updates to your GMB profile; the changes you apply will reflect instantly.

Check and review your campaign data on Google Analytics

You’re almost there. Login to your Google Analytics account and choose the profile you just updated. Click the ‘Acquisition’ tab, find the ‘All Campaigns’ tab, and click there. Then you will see the breakdown of the gathered data from your campaign or ad.

If you want to see the data from all locations, click on a specific campaign, and you will get a secondary dimension of ‘Ad Content.’ It will show you all the areas attached to that campaign or ad.

Now you’re ready to go. So whenever you want to check the performance of your website, campaign, or ad, simply login to Google Analytics to take a peek at the performance over time.