How to Track Google Posts in Google Analytics & Search Console

We have a big study on Google My Business posts that I’m presenting at LocalU on April 7th. While doing that study, there were several things we learned about Google Posts.

Clicks in Google My Business Insights Don’t Match Clicks in Google Analytics. 

If you’re looking inside Google My Business, they have data showing you how many clicks your posts received.

The numbers you see here will not match the numbers you see inside Google Analytics.  There are many reasons for this which I have highlighted in this post.

How to Track Google Posts in Google Analytics

In order to track the activity from Google Posts in Google Analytics, you need to use UTM codes.  After a lot of deliberation, I have decided that the formula below is the best to use:

https://website.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gmbposts[listingname]&utm_content=date

You can easily create a URL just like this one by using Google’s campaign builder. I will highlight below why I believe this formula works the best.

• Source/Medium: Most marketing companies pay really close attention to organic traffic in Google Analytics and if you use anything other than google / organic or it could actually look like you had an organic traffic drop from Google when looking inside Google Analytics.
  
• Campaign:  This is where you can segment the traffic specifically from Google posts.  You want to make sure you include a unique identifier or name for the listing to differentiate it from other listings for that company.  This is especially important for multi-location businesses or businesses that have practitioner or department listings.
•  Content: I had a hard time trying to figure out what to use for this but decided that using a date would work best.  For example, content=feb52021 or content=02052021.  The reason why a date works best here is because to track results from a specific post, you need a system that uses unique identifiers.  It’s hard to keep track of what you used before but a date will literally never get re-used unless you’re posting multiple posts on the same listing on the same day (which isn’t something I’d recommend).

How to See the Traffic inside Google Analytics

In order to see the traffic from a specific post inside Google Analytics, you want to open the Source/Medium report, use “Campaign” as the first dimension, and “Ad Content” as the secondary dimension, as illustrated in the image below.

When looking in this view, you should be able to see all the traffic from Google Posts along with information you won’t get in Google My Business (conversions, time on site etc).

How to See the Traffic inside Search Console

In Search Console, you should now also be able to see the data per post.  Add a filter for the page URL containing “gmbposts” at the top and it should give you a full list of all the posts that got any impressions or clicks.