What Business Profile performance data actually reports

Google defines every performance metric on your Business Profile in one sentence, on one help page, and the definitions are narrower than the labels imply. Two things matter before you read a number: the Performance panel and the Performance API do not return the same list, and the list is not fixed. One metric was withdrawn when Google turned off Business Profile chat on 31 July 2024.

The metrics Google names, and how it defines them

Three limits come first. Google says “Performance data is available only for verified Business Profiles.” It says the panel differs between businesses: “Only metrics that apply to your business appear. Not all metrics are available to you.” And the figures are not organic only: “Performance data includes views, searches, and actions from both organic search results and Google Ads.”

Twelve metrics are named there. Google’s definition of each, quoted:

Metric	Google’s definition
Interactions	“A summary of all your total interactions.”
Searches	“The search terms people used to find your business.”
Views	“How many people viewed your Business Profile on Search and Maps.”
Directions	“How many people asked for directions to your business.”
Calls	“The number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile.”
Website clicks	“The number of times people clicked on the website link on your Business Profile.”
Messages	“The number of different conversations through messages.”
Bookings	“The number of bookings people completed.”
Booking clicks	“The number of times people clicked on your hotel’s booking link.”
Products	“The number of times customers viewed products over a period of time.”
Menus	“The number of times people clicked on the menu content per user, per day.”
Offers	“The number of times customers viewed and clicked on offers on your Business Profile.”

Conditions sit in the sentence after several of those, and they are the part this page is here to point at. Calls needs a number on the profile: “Add your phone number to track this metric.” Booking clicks is for one industry: “This metric only applies for hotels.”

Note what is absent: no reviews metric, no rating metric, no photos metric. If reviews are what you are measuring, this is not the report. Reviews are a separate body of data, with their own tooling and their own rules for replying.

What “views” does not count

Google’s page explains what its own figure counts:

The metric counts the number of unique visitors who viewed your profile. A user can be counted a limited number of times if they visit your Business Profile on multiple devices, such as desktop or mobile, and platforms, such as Maps or Search. A person can only be counted once a day. We don’t count multiple visits on the same day.

So it is closer to daily unique viewers than to views, and Google bounds the scope as well: “This metric only counts the views of your Business Profile and not the overall views of your business on Google.”

Directions has been recounted. Google says “To better represent this metric, we changed how we count unique directions requests to account for:” and then lists multiple taps, direction request cancellation, and spam. It gives no date for that change. Searches runs on its own clock: “The searches metric is updated at the start of each month. It might take up to 5 days to show up.”

The API returns a different list

The Performance API does not expose those labels. Its DailyMetric enum holds eleven metrics plus a default, DAILY_METRIC_UNKNOWN, which Google defines as “Represents the default unknown value.” The definitions are written against the profile rather than the customer:

Enum value	Google’s definition
BUSINESS_IMPRESSIONS_DESKTOP_MAPS	“Business impressions on Google Maps on Desktop devices. Multiple impressions by a unique user within a single day are counted as a single impression.”
BUSINESS_DIRECTION_REQUESTS	“The number of times a direction request was requested to the business location.”
CALL_CLICKS	“The number of times the business profile call button was clicked.”
BUSINESS_FOOD_ORDERS	“The number of food orders received from the business profile.”

Four of the eleven are impressions, desktop and mobile crossed with Maps and Search, each carrying that same deduplication sentence. The panel’s single Views figure has no API equivalent, and neither do Interactions, Booking clicks, Products or Offers. One call returns one metric: Google says locations.getDailyMetricsTimeSeries returns “the values for each date from a given time range that are associated with the specific daily metric.”

The older interface is not deprecated in place, it is gone. The change log records that accounts.locations.reportInsights “has been replaced by locations.fetchMultiDailyMetricsTimeSeries”, along with the “Removal of Metric and MetricOption along with aggregated and breakdown options”.

The metric that was withdrawn

The eleventh enum value is BUSINESS_CONVERSATIONS, and the reference page still defines it: “The number of message conversations received on the business profile.” It does not work. Google’s notice about the end of chat says so:

The “BUSINESS_CONVERSATIONS” metric is no longer available in the Performance API.

The reference page carries no deprecation note, and its footer reads “Last updated 2024-10-16 UTC”, later than the shutdown date in the notice. The panel’s Messages metric and the Analytics integration’s list of seven metrics both still name messages too.

How far back the data goes

Google publishes one retention figure, and not on the performance help page. It is on the Analytics Help page for linking a profile:

Google Business Profile metrics are available for the last 6 months. Reports in Google Analytics can only display data within this period, even if your selected Google Analytics date range is longer.

The current Performance API reference states no equivalent limit on any page we read. The only published range we found sits on the reference for the replaced v4 request object: “The range to gather metrics for. The maximum range is 18 months from the request date.” We are not presenting that as today’s limit, because it documents the object Google replaced. The Analytics page notes one further difference from the panel: “Google Analytics shows every available Google Business Profile metric, regardless of your business type.”

Search terms come from a separate call

Keywords do not arrive with the metrics. They have their own endpoint, which Google documents like this: “Returns the search keywords used to find a business in search or maps. Each search keyword is accompanied by impressions which are aggregated on a monthly basis.” Two details change how you read that. The keyword is “The lower-cased string that the user entered”, untidied. And the number may not be a number: the value is “One of either: 1) The sum of the number of unique users that used the keyword in a month, aggregated for each month requested. 2) A threshold that indicates that the actual value is below this threshold.” A low-volume keyword reports a ceiling, not a count.

Where Google stops defining

Interactions is defined as “A summary of all your total interactions.” Which interactions, and whether it sums the other metrics, is not stated anywhere we read, and we are not going to reconstruct that arithmetic and present it as Google’s. The same applies to Messages: Google defines it as a count of conversations, the feature behind it was switched off, and Google has not published what it counts today. We have not tested that and we are not going to assert it.

Read the definition before you read the number, and check which surface produced it. A views figure from the panel and an impressions total from the API are different quantities, and only one of them is the one Google defined.