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.

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.

Karen Dauncey

Karen Dauncey has been working in SEO since 2003. She specialises in helping businesses get found online through Google using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) She is the founder and creator of The SEO School an online SEO Course to help teach business owners how to do their own SEO. She regularly delivers educational programs for both Local, State and Federal Government and is an advisor for the ASBAS Digital Solutions Program. Karen’s passion and commitment to help small business owners get found online is the driving force behind her online school, making SEO advice accessible to all with free resources and online courses.

Karen's wealth of SEO knowledge and practical digital marketing experience comes from running her own SEO and Google Ads agency, Blue Cherry Online Marketing since 2008. Karen has optimised over 1000 websites, managed millions of dollars' worth of spend on Google Ads and has a solid understanding of the constantly shifting industry of digital marketing and SEO. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. She was recently recognised as an SEO Expert for the popular course creation platform, Kajabi as well as appearing on ABC Radio
for her expert opinion on the ACCC's investigation into search engines.

Karen has attended search engine conferences in London, Stockholm, Adelaide and Sydney, and was also invited to attend a pilot Business Coaching Course at Google’s Head Office. She has a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK.

She is also the co-owner of the Digital Experts Directory, an online directory for female serviced-based businesses to promote their business (with a great backlink for SEO).

To keep up to date with the latest in SEO, join her Facebook group The SEO School Community or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.