The free listing that takes most of your calls and reports none of your sales
For a local business the Google Business Profile is often the busiest front door it has: the call button, the directions, the website link. It reports taps, not customers, and since July 2024 it no longer keeps even a list of who rang. How to find out what the listing is actually worth.
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A plumber in a mid-sized town spends four thousand a month on Google Ads and nothing at all on the box that appears on the right of the results page when somebody searches his name, or on the pin that appears on the map when somebody searches "plumber near me". He has a login for it somewhere. He updated the opening hours over Christmas. If you asked him which of the two produces more phone calls, he would say the ads, because the ads have a dashboard that says so.
He is quite possibly wrong, and he has no way to find out. The Business Profile is, for most local businesses, the single most-used way customers make contact: the call button on a phone, the directions, the link through to the website. It costs nothing, which is part of why nobody measures it. And the reporting Google gives you for it is, to put it kindly, a sketch.
For a local business the Google Business Profile is often the busiest front door it has, and the only one with no record of who came through it.
What the profile reports, in Google's own words
Business Profile performance reports count interactions with the listing: views, searches, call-button taps, website clicks, direction requests, messages and bookings. Each is a count of taps on an element of the profile. None is a count of customers, and none can be tied to an individual.
It is worth reading the definitions closely, because the labels in the interface are friendlier than what is being measured. "Calls" sounds like calls. It is not calls.
Three things follow from that definition, and each of them bends the number in a different direction.
- It over-counts, because a tap is not a conversation. People tap and hang up, tap by accident, tap twice, or tap out of hours and reach a voicemail they do not leave a message on.
- It under-counts, because on a desktop there is no button to tap. The person reads the number and dials it on their phone. That call exists; the profile never hears about it.
- It mixes sources, because taps that followed a paid local ad are in the same total as taps from an unpaid map result. You cannot use it to argue that the free listing is outperforming the paid one, or the reverse.
The call list that was taken away
Until 31 July 2024 a business could opt in to call history on its profile and see a list of recent calls made through it. Google discontinued that feature along with chat. Since then the profile holds no record of individual calls at all, only a count of call-button taps.
Call history was never a serious measurement tool. It was opt-in and limited, and few businesses relied on it. But it was a list of phone numbers with times against them, which is the one thing you need to connect a call to a customer. When it went, the profile stopped being a place where any individual-level record of contact exists.
The practical consequence is simple. If you want to know who called from your listing, you have to arrange to know it yourself. The profile will not tell you, and as of two summers ago it has stopped pretending to.
Why the listing matters more than its reporting suggests
For local and service businesses, the profile is where a large share of customers decide whether to make contact at all: it is where they read the reviews, check the hours and find the number. A channel that busy, measured that badly, is where a budget is most likely to be wrong.
It is easy to dismiss the profile as hygiene — a thing you keep accurate, like the sign over the door. But think about what a customer actually does. They search for a service. They are shown three businesses on a map with a star rating beside each. They open one, read a handful of reviews, look at the photos, and either tap the call button or move to the next. For a great many purchases the entire consideration happens on Google's property and never touches your website. Your site's analytics has no idea it occurred.
Put that beside the reporting and the mismatch is stark. The place where most local customers make up their minds gives you a monthly count of button taps. The channels you pay for give you dashboards by the hour. It is not surprising that budgets follow the dashboards.
Budgets follow dashboards. The free listing has the weakest dashboard in local marketing, so it gets the least attention however many customers come through it.
Making the listing a source you can see
Two changes turn the profile from an unmeasured front door into a trackable source: campaign parameters on every link from the profile, and a tracking phone number in the primary phone field with the real number kept as an additional number. Together they give website visits and calls from the listing their own label.
Neither of these is difficult, and both are permanent once done. They are also both routinely skipped, which is why "organic search" in most local businesses' analytics is a mixture of genuine search results and listing clicks that nobody can separate.
- Tag the website link. Add campaign parameters to the URL in the profile's website field — a source of google, a medium that distinguishes it from ordinary organic, and a campaign naming the location. Do the same for the appointment, menu and products links. A click from the listing now arrives labelled.
- Carry the tag into the lead. Capture those parameters into hidden fields on your forms, so a lead created in that session carries its origin into the CRM rather than leaving it behind in analytics.
- Put a tracking number on the profile. Use a dedicated number from your call tracker as the primary phone, and keep your real local number on the profile as an additional number. Calls from the listing are then recorded — caller, time, duration — by a system you control.
- Use one number per location. A multi-location business that shares one tracking number across ten profiles has rebuilt the problem it set out to solve.
- Leave the numbers alone once set. Keeping the real number on the profile as an additional number means the business's established number stays associated with the listing. Swapping numbers in and out is what causes trouble, not the presence of a tracking number.
One honest limitation: this only captures the people who tap the button or click the link. The desktop user who reads the number off the screen still dials it — and if the number on the screen is the tracking number, that call is caught too, which is one more argument for having it there. The walk-in who asked for directions and turned up is not captured by anything, and should not be guessed at.
From a tracked call to a closed sale
A tracked call from the profile is a row with a phone number, a time and a source. Matching those rows to closed sales on a normalised phone number shows how many of the listing's callers became customers and what they paid, which is the figure the profile's own report can never produce.
This is where the listing stops being a special case. Once its calls come through a call tracker and its form leads carry a tag, they are the same kind of record as a lead from any paid campaign: a contact detail, a date and a source. The source happens to say Business Profile. When a job is invoiced to a customer whose phone number matches, the revenue belongs to the listing.
| What you have | What you can say | What you still cannot say |
|---|---|---|
| Profile performance report only | How many times the call button was tapped this month | Whether anybody called, who they were, or what they bought |
| Tagged links | How many website sessions and form leads came from the listing | Anything about the callers, who are the majority |
| Tracking number on the profile | Who called from the listing, when, and for how long | Which of them became customers |
| Calls and leads matched to closed sales | Revenue, customers and average sale from the listing, by location | Walk-ins and anybody who never made contact |
CloseRev does the last row of that table. Export the calls from your call tracker and the leads from your forms, each with its source, and export your closed sales; it matches them on normalised phone and email and reports revenue by source, so the Business Profile appears as its own line beside Google Ads and everything else. Customers it cannot match to any lead stay in Direct / Unknown and are never shared out.
The result is frequently uncomfortable for whoever runs the paid account. It is common for a well-reviewed local business to find that its free listing closes more revenue than its search campaigns, at no media cost. That does not mean the ads should stop; some of those listing calls were prompted by an ad seen earlier, and the paid local placements feed the same profile. It means the reviews, the photos, the categories and the accuracy of the listing deserve a share of attention proportionate to what they earn, which is rarely what they get.
Multi-location businesses and the profile nobody owns
A business with many locations has many profiles, and each is a separate source with its own calls, its own reviews and its own performance. Measured per location, the listings usually explain more of the difference between branches than the advertising does.
In a group of clinics, dealerships or branches, the profiles are usually somebody's tenth priority. Head office runs the advertising and owns the website. The branch manager answers reviews when there is time. Nobody owns the question of whether the Leeds profile is pulling its weight compared with the Sheffield one.
- Give every location its own tracking number and its own campaign tag, so the source field says which profile, not just that it was a profile.
- Compare closed revenue from the listing per location against that location's review count and rating. The relationship is usually visible to the naked eye.
- Look for the branch whose listing takes plenty of calls and closes few of them. That is an answering problem or a quoting problem, not a marketing one, and it is invisible until calls are matched to sales.
- Treat a sudden drop in one location's listing calls as an incident. Profiles get suspended, merged with duplicates, or edited by members of the public, and the only early warning is a number that was steady and now is not.
None of this needs new software in the branches or a change to how anybody takes a call. It needs a number per profile, a tag per link, and somebody who, once a month, puts the file of calls next to the file of sales and looks at what matched.
What this will not tell you
Matching listing calls and leads to sales measures the customers who made contact through the profile. It does not measure the people who read your reviews and then arrived some other way, the walk-ins, or the customers a poor rating turned away before they ever tapped anything.
The profile's influence is wider than its direct contacts, and it is tempting to try to put a number on the rest. Do not. A customer who read the reviews on Monday and clicked a search ad on Thursday will be credited to the ad, and that is a fair record of how they made contact even though the reviews did half the persuading. No file you own can untangle that, and a model that claims to is guessing with decimal places.
What you can measure is already enough to change a budget. How many paying customers first rang from the listing. What they spent. Which location's listing earns the most and which takes calls that go nowhere. For a channel that until now has been represented in the monthly report by a count of button taps, that is the difference between a sign over the door and a line in the revenue table.
The profile will only ever tell you how many times a button was tapped. What those taps were worth is sitting in your own call log and your own sales file, waiting to be put side by side.
Questions people actually ask
- What does the calls figure in Google Business Profile actually count?
- Taps on the call button on your profile. Google's own help page defines it as the number of times a customer clicked the call button, which is not the same as a call that connected, a call that lasted, or a call from somebody new. It also excludes everybody who read the number off the screen and dialled it by hand, which on a desktop is nearly everybody.
- Does Google Business Profile still have call history?
- No. Google removed the chat and call history features from Business Profile on 31 July 2024. Before that, a business could opt in and see a list of recent calls. Since then the profile reports a count of call-button taps and nothing about the individual calls, so any record of who rang has to come from your own phone system or a call tracker.
- Should I put a tracking number on my Google Business Profile?
- Yes, in the way local search practitioners have long recommended: the tracking number goes in the primary phone field and your real local number stays on the profile as an additional number. That keeps your established number associated with the listing while routing profile calls through something that records them. Do not replace your real number everywhere else on the web; consistency there still matters.
- How do I see Google Business Profile traffic separately in analytics?
- Add campaign parameters to the website link on the profile, and to the appointment and menu links if you use them. Without them, a click from the listing is reported as plain organic search and is indistinguishable from a click on a normal result. With them, it becomes its own source, and any form filled in during that session can carry the tag into your CRM.
- Are direction requests worth tracking?
- As a trend, yes; as evidence of a sale, no. A direction request is a strong signal of intent for a shop, a clinic or a restaurant, and there is no way to connect an individual request to an individual customer. Use the count to notice when something changes, and do not put a value on it. The walk-in who bought something is in your till, not in the profile's report.
- Do Google Ads show up in Business Profile performance numbers?
- They can. Google states that profile performance data includes views, searches and actions from both organic results and Google Ads, so a call-button tap that followed a paid local ad is counted in the same total as one that followed an unpaid map result. That is another reason to measure the listing's calls through your own tracking, where a paid click and an unpaid one can be told apart.