At Digital Harvest, we always say, “what you measure grows.” Take advantage of the Insights section of your business’s Google Business Profile to track phone calls, website visits, direction requests, and so much more. Learn how (and what to look for) in our latest YouTube video, crafted especially for the needs of solar companies.

Download Our Free Guide to Google Business Profile Optimization for Solar Companies: https://digitalharvestsolar.io/GBP

Below, you will find a transcript of this entire video. Enjoy!

Step number 10 in our Ultimate Guide to Google Business Success for solar companies comes down to the insight. So, in previous steps, we’ve talked all about. What to do to get it set up and optimized so you can start attracting new business and further convert, more prospects into appointments and sets and in the insights we’re going to look at how effective your efforts are. There’s a saying that we live by here at Digital Harvest it’s what you measure grows. And so if you take some time, maybe once a month to check on your Google business insights, whether it’s via the app on your phone or via your desktop, you want to understand the data, and what it’s telling you and that’s what I’m going to go into here in the next few slides.

If you understand what it is you’re trying to achieve, and you understand what it is you need to do to pivot or make changes, then you’ve really got the power in your hands to make moves with Google My Business. So when you go into your Google Business Profile and you click on the Insights tab on the left-hand side of the screen, there’s going to be a bunch of information that it breaks down for you. We’re going to cherry-pick a couple of those things that are most important for you to pay attention to.

The first one is How Customers Search for Your Business. You’ll see a pie chart that looks something like this, and it’ll be broken down with up to three different sections colors.

The note in each section, we’re going to move from top to bottom here on this screen, starting with direct searches. What is this measuring? This graph is measuring all the people that found you as a result of their searches. And so direct searches mean these are the people that found your Google business listing because they typed in. Your business name or like the address of your business, and then they found your listing. So that’s one group of people that’s not really going to tell you much about how this, this listing is performing. What it is going to tell you though, is how all of your offline methods of promoting the business are working because people find you directly through that search.

These discovery searches. The second piece that’s right here is people that are searching for solar panels, and solar companies. They’re searching for solar-related search terms online, and then they’re finding your business. So this blue section is the one that you really want to see growing. And becoming bigger and bigger over time because that’s new people coming and finding out about the business that didn’t know before.

Your branded searches. Are related to people looking for the brands you’ve loaded up in the product section of your Google business listing as well as the brand name of your company. Okay. So that’s what these things are measuring. Blue is really where the action is at, in widening the number of people that are finding you through related searches.

So next up we have the, Where Customers View Your Business on Google. In this chart, you can gear it towards one month, or three months.

It says listing on search versus listing on maps. Listing on a search relates to somebody who is specifically using the search function on their desktop or they’re using Chrome or Safari on their phone to do a search. That’s where that data is coming from. Where the listing on maps data is coming from is when people are using the maps function on their phone, the maps app, or they’re using the maps.google search function on their desktop. So that’s how this data is split up.

And so, those two combined give you all the metrics you need to know about people that are finding you, and you can see the spikes. You can see, you know, times when traffic was higher than others. And so what you want to see over time is steady growth. Over a period of time, you’re going to see lots of spikes. And this is, this is the same across all of our different clients.

The next section that you’re going to want to pay attention to is Customer Actions. What this tells you, it’s broken down into a couple of different sections. You’re going to see people that visit your website.

People that call you. And if you’ve listed a physical location for your business, it will also mention the driving directions. People that are coming to your place of business. So probably less applicable.

In solar than other industries. And so this tracks, the actions, the things that are probably most important to you as a business owner are the phone calls, and website visits. Those are going to lead to booked appointments and closed deals. And so really you’re going to, you’re going to want to pay close attention to this. And again, you can scroll through last month, last three months, and such and see the data over time.

Another piece here is the Phone Calls. And so this graph verbalize is looking a little sparse here, but this shows the number of phone calls that you received. It also will help you determine the call volume and when people are calling.

So you might discover that Mondays and Tuesdays, like a lot of our clients, are the busiest times of the week for people to be calling in and things really taper off, especially into Friday, very few people calling in and either requesting quotes or requesting, you know, service and things like that.

So how does that help you as a business owner? Well, it can really help you plan for your office staff and administration, how to handle these calls and when they need to be most available in order to do that for you.

This brings important, more important than maybe you think it is. It’s the Photo Views and Photo Quantity screen. And so what this is going to show you really how you stack up against the competition. So Google’s always going to show you where you’re at in this section and where other people are at.

In previous sections of our ultimate guide to Google my business for solar companies. We talk about how photos are intrinsically related to your visibility and conversion of your Google business profile. And that’s why this screen is so important because all of the things being equal companies that have a hundred photos or more are going to perform way better than solar companies that don’t.

So this will actually track how many photos you’ve put up on your listing. And it’ll also compare you to other companies in this bottom chart. There’s a bottom chart. Isn’t showing the competition here, but on yours, it probably will. Okay. And it’ll say if you are above or below the competition. So if you’re below, of course, that means it’s time to upload more photos and you can make that a better practice moving forward.

So this is one of the things that’s really easy to control and move up and down. If you want more results to start adding more photos, that’s one of the big leavers you can pull on to change. Change up your success. So, if you want to dive even deeper on insights and get a better understanding of what’s in there, what all the data means. We didn’t go into everything here in this video just gave you the top level insights that are important for you to understand what’s happening with your solar marketing and what’s happening with your Google My Business.