How Trustworthy are Direction Requests in Insights?

[Lachlan_Wells]

Hey guys, my client's had a massive increase in driving direction requests thanks to a Local Ads campaign we set up (from about 100/month to 900/month). Despite this they haven't noticed that many more people walking through the doors. Could be attention bias of course, however, given that most of our ad impressions go to the display network on mobile apps and browsers, I'm wondering if gamers could be tapping our directions button by mistake.

Anyone know if GMB tries to filter out direction requests that are likely in error? For example, if the user exits the app immediately or their location never changes? Or do you think it tracks merely a button click?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

@Lachlan_Wells I have always taken the direction request insights with a grain of salt. One of the main reasons why, and I think this is still an issue to this day, is that the insights count a request anytime a user requests directions to the address, and not just that business. So if there are multiple businesses at the same address, you my get direction request data even if the request wasn't specifically for your business.

I am not sure about how Google filters out requests. Would be a good question to ask at the GMB Community.

We did a write-up on GMB Insights as well that you may find useful - [2021] How to Interpret Google My Business (GMB) Insights - Sterling Sky Inc

 

[Lachlan_Wells]

Thanks Colan.

Wow I've never heard that before, if that's true it could make direction requests for stores in shopping centres very inaccurate. Sounds like a great thing to test!

In our case, I think we could eliminate this as a factor. When we paused our local ads campaign, the driving requests immediately returned to benchmark. The client is located in a large shopping centre, so it's possible that their customers were diverted by another store before they walked all the way. We might have to install a sensor at the doors to count the actual foot traffic.

 

[Lachlan_Wells]

Looks like Colan and Barry answered my question, thanks guys

The driving directions metric in the performance report is slightly different in that it may show fewer requests because of Google’s new efforts to combat things like “multi-tapping, direction request cancellation, and spam.

Google My Business performance report adding driving direction requests and website visits

This is slowly rolling out, you might not see it show up yet in your Google My Business account.

searchengineland.com