Instructions: Connect GMB Insights to Google Data Studio

Instructions and Video Below

This is for clients and users of TastyPlacement’s Google My Business Insights Data Connector for Data Studio, it is not a general-purpose tutorial.

Getting Started [The Following Is a Transcript]

[TRANSCRIPT] Okay we’re gonna do a video now of how to get your Google my business insights data into Google Data Studio using the TastyPlacement insights connector. Alright we’ll do a few things I want to cover some prerequisites of what account access you’ll want to have and then the steps to do it. So the first thing you want you know you need a Google my business account and you can see you got insights here: this is really valuable, alright?

So here’s this is for TastyPlacement and when you go to your insights I mean this is almost as good as a website conversion right where people are finding you in search and views in search and in the Maps ecosystem, customer actions, visit to the website, directions (great for retail) call you, good for any business, and a new chat feature–we should do a video on that. Anyway, this  data would be really valuable to include in a report along with adwords or analytics data, right? And so we built this data connector and if you’re a customer of the connector this is for you.

So, and then over on the data studio side–you should have some familiarity with this and we don’t really have a basic video yet but we’re gonna build one soon…I want to do it in two ways: I’ve got an insights report but you can see this there’s no data connector here it’s just a blank template which we make here. It’s got a second page, right, so in order to just really briefly if we start with a blank report and start editing it you know you make your data connection and then you can add these elements…

Making the Data Connection With the Data Connector

Let’s start by getting the data connector into here so this is really just completely blank although it kind of has its graphical elements built.

Alright, so, I like to build my data sources first all at one time so we’re going to manage our data sources you can see we’ve got the Google sample data here. We’re just going to go ahead and remove that, okay?

So now … here comes the magic. This is this is the key point of making the connection: we’re going to connect to insights, and here’s the other thing key how you’re logged in. You have got to be logged in to the Data Studio account that you want to use and logged into the same account where your Google My Business account is. Now, if those aren’t in the same account you can you can go into the Google My Business for the other account and go to users and share that way, right? So, we’ve got a bunch of users here on our account, right? I just like having this [Google My Business Account] open.

So, we’ll go back to our main report and back to where we’re going to add a data source … if you’re one of our customers and you’ve been shared you get a link to this, and this is the GMB insights .10, and this is pretty new so we’re going to keep upgrading this as the weeks come by. And there are some new Insights available, photo views, the number of photos uploaded and that hasn’t been released into the Google My Business insights API yet, but presumably it will be soon. We will include that metric when it comes.

Finalizing the Connection

So, we begin by clicking the connector–ok let me take that back one step just to show you–so from the document go to resources, then of data sources, okay? There are other ways to navigate here but that’s pretty simple. And, I’m going to add a data source and you can see here if you used Data Studio before you’ve got Analytics, Google sheets, databases, and Adwords and that’s where you kind of start with Data Studio. it’s great to put your adwords and your analytics on one report and we certainly use it for that.

So, if we go to the GMB insights here, our data connector you can see there’s a warning,  “connectors have not been verified” that just means it’s not in the community connectors program through Google; and since the Google My Business insights API is private there’s no way we’d ever get it through so I’m not going to try.

So, if you’ve got multiple locations in your Google My Business account that will appear here. I’ve only got the one, I’ve got just TastyPlacement, so I’m going to select that and then connect and there’s going to be a little delay because there’s a lot going on.

Okay there we go so! We’ve got these parameters here, these metrics, queries indirect, driving directions, views on maps, queries direct, views in search results, clicks to website, and phone calls, and of course our dimension is time.

These are all the insights that you see within the web interface itself. But you know before this product, you know, we were reporting to our own clients with screenshots, which is for the birds. So now we add it to the report, and yeah we’re about to add a data source and we did want to do that so we’re going to click yes.

Okay so we go back here but now it doesn’t look any different except I can, if I go to this element here now the data source is at the top of my list I can select it.

It’s a good idea we are using a template here because we once we made the initial connection to a blank page we just built out little elements and these are going to be scorecards. Now, it will delay because it’s going to get three months of data. And there we are! Views on maps, 1,412 for the 30-day period.

Okay I could change that … I could go over to queries direct and since it’s cached already from Google My Business insights it’s a lot faster now.

So here we go let’s go back to that and so another thing I like to do is I just kind of highlight these in a bunch from here it goes super quick, right?

I’m holding down the ctrl key as I do this right and just to click multiples so if I click on the first one and click on the second one without ctrl key, I’m just I’m selecting a new items. If you ctrl key and then you can click multiple items or you can even do a sweep you know. And that’s that’s that’s how it works, that’s it and then you know you can do what you do with these reports send it to a client, send it to a manager, share it with your partner, your coworkers; and of course it acts like any kind of Drive document or Google Doc whatever you prefer to call it.

Access to Our Google My Business Insights API Solution

There are two ways to get access to the GMB Insights connector for Data Studio:

1. Become a Client of Tastyplacement. We use our Data Connector in connection with our client relationships on campaigns we pursue.

2. IF YOU ARE AN AGENCY and you want to purchase access to the tool, the software is $199 per month for up to 100 clients.