The Insights Nobody Reads

Why they get ignored

The screen opens with a large number of views, which goes up and down for reasons nobody can act on, and the natural response is to conclude the whole thing is decorative.

Underneath that headline are two or three figures that answer questions a small business genuinely has.

Whether people are finding you by name or by what you do. Whether the people who find you take any action. And which words they used.

Those are worth ten minutes a quarter, and the view count is worth none.

The split that matters most

The distinction between people who searched for your business by name and people who searched for what you do and found you.

The first group already knew about you: referrals, repeat customers, people checking you out before phoning.

The second group is new business generated by the listing itself.

A listing dominated by name searches is confirming your existing reputation, which is valuable and is not growth.

A listing with a meaningful share of category searches is winning customers who had never heard of you, which is what improving the listing is for.

Watching that ratio over quarters tells you whether the work you are doing is having the intended effect, and it is the single most useful thing on the screen.

Actions, not views

• Calls made from the listing.
• Direction requests, which precede a visit.
• Clicks to the website.
• Messages, where enabled.
• Bookings, where integrated.

Those are the outcomes. Views are the opportunity, and a listing with many views and few actions is being seen and rejected, which is a specific and fixable problem.

The ratio worth calculating

Actions divided by views, done once and then tracked.

It does not matter what the number is in absolute terms, since it varies enormously by category and by area.

What matters is the direction over time, and what happens to it when you change something.

Add twenty photographs and the ratio should move. Fill in the services list and it should move. Get thirty reviews and it should move.

If you make a change and the ratio does not move over the following quarter, you have learned something useful about that change, which is more than most listing work ever produces.

The search terms

Underused and the most directly actionable part.

The listing reports the queries people used before it appeared, which is your customers describing what they want in their own words.

Read the list rather than skimming it. It will contain terms you do not use, services you offer but do not advertise, and occasionally things you do not do at all.

Each of those is instruction: words to use in your services list, a service worth adding to the site, or a category that is attracting the wrong people.

It is the same value as reading your own enquiry forms, available without asking anybody.

A worked example

A business looked at their listing statistics for the first time in two years.

Views were up, which they had assumed meant progress.

The split showed something else: almost all of the growth was in searches for their business name, and category searches had been flat throughout.

So the listing was serving people who already knew them and had not brought anybody new in two years.

The search terms explained part of it. The words people used were the specific service names, and their listing had two broad services set.

They listed fourteen services in the customer's words, added photographs, and started asking for reviews consistently.

Category searches roughly doubled over the following two quarters, and the actions ratio improved with them.

Compare quarters, not months

The discipline that stops this being noise.

Monthly figures move for weather, holidays, a competitor's campaign, and reasons nobody can identify, and a business reacting to them will chase nothing.

A quarter smooths most of that, and the same quarter last year handles seasonality, which monthly comparison cannot.

Look at it four times a year, write down the three numbers, and keep the list somewhere you will find it.

Six quarters of three numbers is a genuinely useful record, and it takes ten minutes a quarter to build.

What the numbers cannot tell you

Worth stating so they are not over-read.

A call from the listing is not a customer, and the proportion that convert is invisible here.

Direction requests include people who never arrived, and staff, and anybody curious.

Attribution windows and definitions change, so a step change between periods can be a measurement change rather than a real one.

And none of it connects to revenue, which means the listing can look excellent while producing work you do not want.

Pair it with your own count of enquiries and the question about how people found you, which is the part these figures cannot supply.

Where photographs show up

A smaller figure worth a look, since it is the one place the listing tells you something about your own images.

The statistics report how often your photographs were viewed, and frequently compare that against other businesses in your category.

That comparison is coarse and it does answer one question: whether your listing is visually thin relative to the businesses you are shown alongside.

A business sitting well below the comparison, with four photographs from 2018, has been told plainly what to do next.

One sitting above it can stop worrying about photographs and spend the effort on reviews or the services list instead.

The counter-case

There is a limit to how much these deserve.

For a small business the numbers are frequently too low to be stable, so a quarter with forty actions and one with fifty-five is not necessarily a change in anything.

There is also a risk in optimising for the visible metric: photographs and posts move views, and views are not the objective, so a business chasing the chart can spend time on the thing that is measured rather than the thing that matters.

The reliable indicators for a small local business remain reviews, an accurate and complete listing, and photographs of real work.

Do those, then check quarterly whether the category searches are moving. That is the whole use of this screen.

The ten minutes

1. Ignore total views.
2. Note the name versus category split.
3. Note calls, directions and website clicks.
4. Calculate actions against views.
5. Read the search terms properly.
6. Write down three numbers and the date.
7. Compare quarters, and the same quarter last year.

Step two is the number that tells you whether any of your listing work is bringing in people who had not heard of you.

Numbers that look impressive and mean little are covered in vanity numbers in a monthly report.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.