Different from Google Analytics, Google business listing Insights shows local businesses where customers find them on Google, and also shows various customer actions, like requesting directions, phone calls and views. However, since August 16th, the photo views seem to be broken.
I actually got a call from a client, telling me that his Google My Business statistics were showing that he had zero views for his images.
This was unusual because his business is very visual, and he shares a lot of pictures that get a lot of views.
The odd thing though, was that the second statistic was also showing zero, for “businesses like yours”. I checked the statistics for another client, then another, and another, and consistently tracking seems to have stopped as of August 16
Check your Own insights
To check your own stats, and see if you’re affected, log into Google My Business.
Look for the link reading “Manage Location” that shows up in the square tile listing for your business, and click that.
If you don’t see “tiles” like this, and instead you see a list of all your Google businesses, then change your view to see these tiles.
I’m going to assume that they’re broken for everyone, since I checked 8 or 9 clients before writing this.
I’m pretty sure this has nothing to do with the change in how Google Maps business photos can be reported, but I’m not really sure… I suppose it’s all one big ecosystem, sort of, so anythings possible. If the feature is *not” broken for you, and you are seeing stats, please do leave a comment below.
Admittedly, this particular statistic is one that not many folks may may care much about. In fact, very few people even look at their local business insights. Still though, I was surprised nobody in the LocalSEO Twittersphere seems to have noticed yet, so I thought I’d make this quick post.
View Comments (5)
This was very interesting, looks like as of August 21, 2017 its recording photo views again, at least spot checking through a variety of locations that we manage.
A Google TC +TimCapper says that they're getting it caught up every couple of weeks, after it actually died August 8th!
Did it die again around Mar ~ Apr 2018
Did it die again during Mar~Apr, 2018?
Hmm - it must have. Things break all the time... It's amazing!