GMB Searches Greater than Views?

[klharris08]

Hello community of SEO's. Anybody ever see a client who generated more searches than views? I know views as a metric are generally worthless but I've never seen this before so if anybody has any smart thoughts please share.

 

[CraigJMount]

Your "Branded" searches probably aren't being counted. "When Listing Was Found" likely only includes direct and discovery.

More info here- About Insights - Google My Business Help

Also, I wouldn't trust data from "Insights". It's pretty consistently inaccurate.

 

[JoyHawkins]

@klharris08

I asked Google about this but they'd like to see the specific scenario to give a better explanation. Can you post a thread on the GMB forum and PM me a link to it so I can escalate it and ask?

 

[Sherm]

Interesting stuff for sure. FYI, we had to start a new listing as our listing got suspended by Google. Now we're having to start everything all over again. Lost all our good photos, posts. They did recover our Reviews though.

 

[Sherm]

Oh, and we lost our Q/A's

 

[thibault]

@klharris08

I asked Google about this but they'd like to see the specific scenario to give a better explanation. Can you post a thread on the GMB forum and PM me a link to it so I can escalate it and ask?

Would also look at more historical data to see if that's always been the case over. I've seen this a few times for new listings.

 

[klharris08]

@JoyHawkins & @thibault - Okay so I figured this out, we were pulling this data via the GMB API too quickly. Google doesn't send the data through all at once so when we were pinging for these metrics not all of them had been aggregated on Google's side. Repulling this data 2 weeks later we see different data (which makes sense now), searches are not greater than views. It looks like Google needs time to aggregate all of these metrics together so if you don't wait (I'm trying to understand how long) - the API will provide you with incomplete data and you'll get some very wonky data. Lesson learned don't trust GMB Insights the first couple of days they are available and let them normalize.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Thanks for sharing Kyle. That's really helpful and I'll be sure to reference this if people experience that in the future.