Google Local Insights is Not Counting Photo Views

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.

You would do that by looking at the top of all your listings, and clicking the “Card View” icon that should be showing, and looks like this –

Then just click the left menu item for “insights”, scroll down to the photos area, see if you have any stats showing past August 16th, 2017.

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.