Yesterday I posted a reminder of why we all need a Google Business Profile (‘GBP’) and how to keep it up to date. One more thing might be worthwhile setting up: ‘tagging’ the link to our company website there, so that we can segment out the traffic in Google Analytics. By default, Google just sends all organic search traffic through with the ‘google/organic’ source/medium, whatever link the visitor clicks.
It’s pretty easy. All we have to do is go to our Google Business Profile Manager dashboard page (formerly the Google My Business admin page) and under ‘Info’, find the entry for the website link.
We’ll now replace that with a tagged link, which we’ll build using Google’s Campaign URL Builder:
- Under ‘website URL’, enter the full website URL (e.g. https://www.example.com). Make sure it’s exactly how things resolve when someone visits the website, i.e. with the correct http/https choice and inclusion (or not) of ‘www’;
- Under ‘campaign source’ enter ‘google’ (no capitals, just like that);
- Under ‘campaign medium’, either enter ‘organic’ (if we want traffic to continue appearing under the standard ‘google/organic’ source/medium entry in Google Analytics); or enter ‘gbp’ (if we want to separate out the traffic at that high level as ‘google/gbp’). I prefer to use the former;
- Under ‘campaign name’ enter ‘google-business-profile’ and copy the ‘generated name’ below.
Paste the link into a browser to ensure it works. It will be something like:
‘https://bluewidgetcompany.co.uk/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google-business-profile’
Return to the GBP dashboard page and replace the website URL with the same long tagged URL. Click ‘Apply’ and it’ll probably tell you the change is ‘under review’. Check back in Google Analytics a week or so later to see your GBP traffic separated out, either as a separate ‘source/medium’ entry, or as a new ‘campaign’ (which can be seen if added to the source report as a ‘Secondary Dimension’).
There’s a good article which goes more in-depth on tracking GBP traffic here.