Track Google MyBusiness Users in Analytics & Search Console

A Google MyBusiness listing is essential to many smaller and local businesses. Not only does the listing appear prominently for searches for the business name or brand , but it can also appear for more generic searches in the so-called “localpack”, local search results and, of course, Google Maps. Especially on mobile devices, this local-pack takes an extremely prominent position and pushes the other organic search results further down.

In competetive niches, it is often easier to rank with the local MyBusiness listing than in the “normal” organic search results. Although the most important contact data, such as address, phone number or opening hours are already displayed directly on Google, many users click on the “Website” button to get more detailed information about the business and its service on the website.

But how many users actually click on that website button and visit the website via the local results?

Google MyBusiness as referrer

Sure, in the Google MyBusiness backend there are some reports, showing the number of impressions (how often my listing appeared), clicks on the phone number, get directions button or website button and some other data:

n Google Analytics, however, these users are included in the standard organic traffic.  How many users actually came via the MyBuisness lisiting and how they used the website (which and how many pages they viewed, which actions they took,…) is impossible to find out. But we can solve the problem very easily by adding parameters to the URLs.

With the URL Builder Google offers a very easy and simple tool. Just enter the URL of your homepage (or other URLs that you want to add in the MyBusiness profile, like contact or service pages) and put additional information in the given fields to add UTM parameters:

https://www.example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=mybusiness&utm_term=1080

As source we should use “Google” since our users will always come via Google as the MyBusiness profile is not displayed anywhere else. As medium we could use “organic”, since our users will normally get our listing on the SERPs or Google Maps without us paying for it. As the campaign name, we use “mybusiness” to add the information that all users coming via this link must have clicked on our MyBusiness profile. With the fields campaign term & campaign content we have two more parameters available for further differentiation. This can be useful, for example, if you have several branches and therefore more MyBusiness listings. Then the city or postal code can be passed here, so that we later know which entry brought the click.

Make sure that you add these parameters to all links you put in your MyBusiness profile! The report can be viewed in Google Analytics under Acquisition / All Campaigns:

As a result, of course, there are many more options. For example you can use the MyBusiness campaign for creating segments to compare your MyBusiness users to users from other sources. Or you can use it to set up custom audiences for remarketing campaigns.

MyBusiness Performance in the Google Search Console

It was interesting for us to see that the performance of our MyBusiness entry also appears in the Search Analytics Report in the Google Search Console.

After tagging our links, we were able to filter our URL parameters in Search Console and get data for only the performance of our MyBusiness listings:

We strongly recommend this tweak to all local businesses so you can get insightful data in you local traffic.