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<\/p>\nYou may have noticed that your Google My Business (GMB) Insights metrics suddenly spiked for searches and views last month. You may have even quietly congratulated yourself on a job well done. After all, it looked as if your discovery and direct searches had risen significantly\u2014coupled with increased views on both Google Maps and standard search.<\/p>\n
Well, we’re sorry to have to burst your bubble, but all is not as it seems. From the perspective of a single business, it’s easy to interpret these spikes as a huge win for your marketing efforts. But from our unique vantage point, we have been able to deduce that this unusual development is actually part of a pattern that repeated itself across all of our clients. Here’s how our super sleuths got to the bottom of this head-scratching local search mystery.<\/p>\n
It was a normal day. We were preparing for client reporting calls, comparing search results year-over-year and paying particular attention to performance over the previous three months. With a fresh pot of coffee brewing, we generated graphics to illustrate our findings:<\/p>\n
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![\"Local](\"\/wpe-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/2.jpg\")
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If we were looking at a single location or client, this data could easily be mistaken as a significant marketing breakthrough. But we noticed that this spike repeated itself for almost all of our clients\u2014across many unrelated industries\u2014and started to suspect that whatever we were seeing was actually affecting all local search<\/a>.<\/p>\n Our first instinct was to correlate our findings against customer actions, including phone calls, website visits, and direction requests. Why? Because these actions are less likely to be reported in error as they require a user performing a specific task. After comparing customer action data for the past quarter for several clients, the answer became clear:<\/p>\n As you can see, unlike views and searches, Google customer actions remain uniform throughout. This would indicate that the September spike was in fact a change in Google’s reporting methodology; perhaps the addition of a source that was previously unaccounted for\u2014one that had no measurable impact on the actual traffic being driven to businesses.<\/p>\n \n Get exclusive insights into digital ![\"Local](\"\/wpe-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/3.jpg\")
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