If your business is listed on Google, you might have noticed that you recently lost some data. Specifically, your analytics may have changed drastically in the last month — or you have new metrics entirely.
That's due to changes from Google, and specifically the release of their new Business Profile Performance API. With this data source — and the new data points it includes — Google is shifting away from their legacy Google My Business API and improving upon the metrics that they offer to businesses and third parties.
This is great for businesses that want to see more granularity in their own or their clients' metrics, like a breakdown of impressions-type metrics by desktop and mobile searchers, more types of customer actions, or more granularity in what people are actually searching for when they find your business.
That said, the changes can also be startling for businesses that rely on legacy APIs to track performance over time, or that have set up complex systems to ingest and analyze this data at scale. The Data Insights team at Yext has fielded many questions about this lately, and we've built out a handful of tools and documents to help guide our customer and partners through the transition.
Chief among these tools? Our Search Journey Data Hub.
This data hub helps businesses see how their metrics have changed over the last few years — including backfilled data for these new metrics as far back as 2019 — and allows them to put their own volume or growth in perspective within their industry, sub-industry, or geography.
The Search Journey Data Hub was designed to help businesses capitalize on these new types of Google metrics. It helps businesses do things like compare mobile versus desktop search volume for their industry or geo, or look at emerging customer actions like Business Bookings, Business Conversations, and Online Orders. You can also look at more traditional engagement actions like Phone Call Clicks, Driving Directions Clicks, and Clicks to Website from Google Listings.
