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Google My Business Insights to get more recent data

Google promised to reduce the latency of the Google My Business Insights reports and tools.

Barry Schwartz on November 19, 2018 at 9:34 am

Google announced its help forums that Google My Business Insights, the analytics for Google My Business users, will soon have more recent data to look at. Kara from Google said, “we’ve made improvements to ensure that your Insights data is more up-to-date….To give you a more accurate idea of how your listing is performing, you’ll now see Insights data up to yesterday in Google My Business.”

What is Google My Business Insights? Insights is a section within the Google My Business console where business owners and managers can see how well or poorly their local listing is doing in Google Maps or search. It helps business owners understand how people find their local listings in Google, if those leads to calls, directions or web site clicks and much more. It is basically a small analytics package for your Google My Business listings.

What is changing? As you can see from the screen shot above, the data is currently about three days behind. I see data for my own business from Friday, November 16th. But Google said the data will soon show as recent as from yesterday.

Why should you care? Having more recent data helps businesses in many ways including being able to more accurately compare trends. Also, the day after a big surge in walk-in traffic to a business, you can find out more hints about the reason for the surge the day after using Google My Business Insights as opposed to having to wait three to four days. And in general, having data at your fingertips sooner than later is always better for business owners and marketers.

Postscript: Google has returned to update us that this did not roll out yet. Kara from Google wrote “There’s been a delay in this launch. We hope to have it live in the next 3-6 months.”

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.