GMB Insights call report wrong by a factor of 3 - Surprising?

[Tim Colling]

We set up a call tracking number for one client's GMB listing. In the insights for the GMB listing for the past 30 days, Insights reports 27 calls.

However, the reports available for the call tracking number show that there were actually 85 calls.

Is that surprising, that Insights would be off by a factor of almost three?

 

[whitespark]

Hi Tim,

That's not surprising. GMB insights will only track calls where the user clicked or tapped to call. So, mostly on mobile only. When someone just sees the number and calls it, Google has no way of tracking that. A 3x multiplier is a pretty good estimate for how many calls you're actually getting.

 

[Tim Colling]

Hi Tim,

That's not surprising. GMB insights will only track calls where the user clicked or tapped to call. So, mostly on mobile only. When someone just sees the number and calls it, Google has no way of tracking that. A 3x multiplier is a pretty good estimate for how many calls you're actually getting.

Thanks, Darren. I just recently began using CTNs so I had not thought about that.

Just when I thought it was safe to show clients their Insights reports...

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Tim one way to get a sense of how accurate this is is to filter your traffic in Google Search Console by Mobile vs Desktop and if you are using a UTM for your GMB landing page you can filter by that URL and get a sense of how much activity is coming from Mobile Vs Desktop. In your example you would expect to see a large piece of the pie be desktop.

 

[mattheffner]

I just noticed something similar (though not quite as extreme) for a new client I'm working with. Insights showed 35 calls for the month and call tracking shows 65 calls. So, almost 2x in this case. I just moved all clients to call tracking a couple weeks ago so will be interesting to see how this plays out across all of them here in October and beyond. Colan, thanks for the tip on search console that is helpful to know.