Google My Business Adds ‘Branded Search Reporting’ To Better Classify Customers

Google My Business Insights, the analytics within the local dashboard, is having an update.

Here, Google is letting users to filter their analytics to show the percentage of people finding their business through Google local and Maps through branded searches, either through searching on the company's name, company's brand and generic keywords such as categories, products or services.

To see this, webmasters just need to login into their Google My Business account and click on the 'insights' section to see the pie chart which has been updated to have three cut outs.

The section of insight shows how people were finding your business:

  1. Direct searches (green): A customer directly searched for your business name or address.
  2. Discovery searches (blue): A customer searched for a category, product, or service that you offer, and your listing appeared.
  3. Branded searches (yellow): A customer searched for a brand related to your business. This category will only appear if your listing has appeared at least once for a branded search.
The section of Google My Business insight shows how people were finding your business
The 'branded' one shows how many people found the business on Google Maps and local search for brand related searches

Insights give you an inside look at how people find your business listing on the web. Because many people can find businesses on Google Search and Maps, the insights section focuses on how customers use Search and Maps to find your listing, and what they do once they find it.

According to Google, 'branded searches is a metric that shows how many customers have searched for a brand related to your business. For example, a customer looking for a fast food chain and searched for "McDonald’s" and found your fast food restaurant listing.

Why the update matters is because it gives you a bit more details on how your customers are finding your business in local search.

This should in turn help you understand how many people are searching for your business, and also helping your in improving your local SEO strategy.

"This graph shows you the number of people who searched for your business by name or by category. These searches are calculated individually, so if a user did a discovery search and then a direct search, we would count these as 2 searches (or one in each section)," noted Google on its Help page.

Published: 
23/10/2018