Google My Business (GMB) will soon roll out changes to its performance reports. It’s some digital gold that will help you with Local SEO.
In this article, I’ll cover the new GMB features and how you can use them.
Better Insights
For starters, the updated GMB reporting gives you more insights into interactions. That will tell you how often people reached out to you after visiting your GMB profile.
But that’s what you can see right now. Look for more goodies in the coming months.
For example, you’ll soon see detailed reports about how many people saw your business profile in search results.
Additionally, the performance reports will also show data from Google Maps. Google hasn’t yet used Maps data in its GMB reporting.
Local Business Benefit
The new analytics give you a big win if you’re a local marketer.
Why? Because sometimes your GMB page can get you more customers than your website.
In fact, it’s safe to say that it’s frequently the case that your business profile will land more leads than your homepage.
So you want data and details on how well your GMB profile performs in search. The new features make it easier for you to get those insights.
Also, Google will make its search data available for up to six months. That will give you enough data to see how well your site improved over a custom time frame.
You can also use the reports to compare data.
The interaction metrics get updated daily. However, other metrics get updated monthly.
In other words, you won’t see a daily update like you do with Search Console for most of the analytics. Instead, you’ll need to look at the big picture over time.
Reviewing Your Report
If you’d like to review your reports, it’s easy to do so.
Just sign in to Google and search for your business. Click on View Profile to manage your profile.
Then, select Promote and Performance.
Now you have the option to select a date range for your report. Go ahead and pick that range. Then click Apply.
Voila! There’s your report.
Video Length Restriction
Google rolled out another change to GMB. And it’s one you might not like.
The maximum video size you can upload now stands at 75 Mb instead of 100 Mb.
Google confirmed the change to Joy Hawkins, who tweeted:
If you're having issues uploading videos to Google My Business, it could be because they just changed the video maximum file limit from 100MB to 75 MB. https://t.co/S5VL7QTRE5
— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) October 4, 2020
Why did Google make the change? The company didn’t provide an answer.
No point in over-thinking it, though. Google probably just wants to save hard drive space.
Some users recently reported problems uploading images. But Google hasn’t reported any changes about image uploads.
Wrapping It Up
It’s a mixed bag of good and bad news if you’re a local marketer. However, the good news here far outweighs the bad.
The enhanced insights on GMB reporting will help you fine-tune your Local SEO. That translates to more opportunities to land customers.
And some of those customers could hang around for life.
