How To Set Up Google Business Profile Tracking

Your Google Business Profile (GBP, formerly Google My Business) listing is a great source of free, organic traffic. As a local business, if you don’t have Google Business Profile set up, stop what you’re doing and go claim your listing now.

If you do have Google Business Profile set up, great! But, tracking the success of your listing isn’t as straightforward as creating your account and filling out your business profile.

The insights report within Google Business Profile will show you what keywords your listing has shown up for and other ways people are interacting with your listing.

It will even tell you how many clicked on your website link, but, it cannot tell you what those visitors that clicked did after. So you’re only getting part of the story.

With the help of UTM codes and Google Analytics, you can get the whole story and find out just how valuable Google Business Profile is to your business.

There are several different Google Business Profile links that you can track referral traffic from:

• Your “Website” button
• Your phone link
• Your Google Business Profile Posts
• Your services and products links
• Your appointment links

In this guide, we’re going to focus on the most important link to track; your website link.

An Example of Google Business Profile Tracking

The screenshot below is from one of our SEO clients. This is from Google Analytics. What you are looking at is a view located under Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium in your Google Analytics account. This shows where all traffic to your website is coming from.

The red box in the screenshot above is showing referral traffic to our client’s website over a 30-day period.

Google Business Profile brought in the 3rd largest amount of traffic with 98 website visits.

Google Business Profile referral traffic only made up a little over 5% of their entire website visitors during this time period, but those visits account for over 27% of goal completions!

Goal completions were set up using Google Tag Manager [Learn How to Set Up Google Tag Manager]. In this example, the “Goal Completions” are leads (form completions, clicks to call, etc.)

As you can see, Google Business Profile is crucial to lead generation for this business. But without tracking referral traffic and setting up goals, we wouldn’t know that.

Getting Started: The Simplest Way to Track GMB Referral Traffic

The simplest way to track the majority of your GMB referral traffic is by:

1. Creating a UTM (Urchin tracking module) URL. You can easily create one here.
2. Input your website URL, your Campaign Source as “Google” and your Medium and Name as “GBP” (which stands for Google Business Profile).
   
3. Select “Copy URL.”
4. Go over to your Google My Business account to the “Info” section:
   
5. Then select your website button and a modal box will appear:
   
6. Paste the copied link into the “Primary website” input field and select “Apply”

That’s it! You did it. And for those skeptics out there – no, there is no negative effect to having UTM codes in this field.

So what exactly does this do?

This adds information to your website URL so that Google Analytics can understand where the traffic is coming from and pass that information on to you in your Google Analytics account.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you aren’t tracking the behavior of visitors that come from your Google Business Profile, you won’t know just how important it is to be paying attention to.

When you are tracking everything properly, keep in mind that success follows investment. When you invest time and resources into SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, and any other form of digital marketing, you need to measure what matters and then you’ll know what the most effective digital marketing channels are for your business.

Begin Your Investment

If you’re ready to dive head-first into the world of SEO and turn your website into a lead-generating machine, reach out to us today. We’ll explain exactly how we’d use SEO to upgrade your site and answer any questions you have.

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