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March 7, 2022

How To Measure Your Website Traffic From Google Business Profile

If you’re not using your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) to the max, you could be getting ‘stuck in traffic.’

There’s a wealth of really valuable information available with regards to your website traffic (like where visits come from, which pages users go to etc), but unless you’ve specifically set up your Google Analytics profile, your traffic will simply be tracked as ‘organic’.   And if ‘organic’ is all you’re getting at the moment, then you could be stuck in a rut and missing out on important insights which could give you a competitive advantage. The old version of Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) is being replaced with Google Analytics 4. If you haven’t upgraded to GA4 yet, you really should, you can find out more in our “Why You Should Upgrade To GA4

It’s important to measure your website traffic from Google My Business and segment it from organic traffic because it gives you a clear idea of how users are interacting with your listing.  It enables you to identify if you are seeing an increase in traffic from Google My Business (so you know what you are doing is working) or if you see a drop in traffic that can flag a potential issue with your listing. 

The extra data informs your decisions, helps you make positive changes, build on successful pages, revise your strategy if your results aren’t what you expected and adapt your messaging and/or your activities to meet users’ needs.  

If you are just getting started with Google My Business, my free Beginners Guide to Google My Business should help.

The good news is that the process to collect this extra data from Google My Business is a simple one – a process that basically involves adding parameters to a URL in a web ad or email which captures the additional information using the Google Analytics Campaign Builder tool. 

Find Your Primary Domain

On your Google Business Profile, you will normally track the home page of your website. You want to make sure you are using the primary domain of your website address; this is the version of your website that Google has indexed. 

  • Search for your business name on Google, click on the website result and then double-click in the top browser to check what your domain name is.

The SEO School website

Set-up a Unique URL

  • Visit the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder here https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/ga4/campaign-url-builder/
  • This tool is going allow you to add a modified URL string using Google’s Campaign URL Builder. The process is self-explanatory and you just have to go through the various fields and fill in the details.  And here’s more good news!  It’s absolutely no problem if you have multiple listings – just make sure you fill in a unique identifier for each one (eg gmb_listing_perth or gmb_listing_brisbane) in the “Campaign name”
  • Add your primary domain name
  • Add ‘’google” as your campaign source
  • Add “local” as your medium
  • Add “gmb_listing” as your campaign name

Update Google Business Profile

Now you need to log back into your Google My Business Profile and update the URL on your listing.

  • Login to your Google Business Profile
  • On the left menu, click ‘Info’
  • Click on the pencil icon and insert your updated URL
  • Click ‘Apply’ to save

Don’t be alarmed if you get a warning from Google that your changes have to be reviewed and that approval could take a while.  In my experience, this is merely a formality and the updated information is generally published almost immediately.

Check Your Google Analytics

Once this has been done, you’re good to go but wait a few days to get some traffic from your Google Business Profile through to your website (or click on your website from your Google Business Profile yourself)!  You’ll now be able to access valuable information about your Google Business Profile through Google Analytics, such as webpage views, traffic and which users came to your website by clicking the ‘website’ button on your Google Maps listing.

To see this information, log into your Google Analytics account, click on Acquisition in the left-hand side navigation and then into Source/Medium

A Final Word..

Knowing how your customers find you gives you valuable information about them.  Are they searching for you by name or are they searching for a product or service and came to you via Google Business Profile?  You can use this information to refine your keywords, identify and analyse trends and make changes where necessary.

Insights into your Google Business Profile and what it’s doing (or not doing) for your business could be the difference between customers finding you – or finding your competitors.   I always encourage my clients to start by measuring website traffic from Google and then expand the campaign data to delve even deeper into the user journey.  That way, they get to really understand user behaviour and structure their online presence to give them what they want!

If you want to DIY your SEO or want a booster course to learn some clever tricks and techniques, check out my new course, The SEO School.  I’ve taken my 20 years of experience as a Perth SEO specialist and put it into a self-managed online course designed to help business owners and website managers take control of their SEO.  It’s modular, so you progress in your own time and you implement SEO strategies as you go along, getting lots of expert support when you need it.

For more information or to book, head for The SEO School.

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