Google Business Profile Photo Insights Will Go Away
Joy Hawkins, a Google top contributor, confirmed on Friday that Google will not be migrating the Google Business Profile Photo Insights to the new performance dashboard in search. The Insights section is the Google Business Profile photo analytics section.
In the previous Google My Business dashboard, business owners were able to go to the photos section and see how many views each photo on the profile had. A photo report was also available in the Insights section to see overall data from the month.
Reasons for Removing Google Business Photo Metrics
So, why did Google remove photo metrics? There has been speculation of Google possibly removing the feature due to storage issues. It may also be that Google simply does not think that Photo Insights are an important feature in comparison to the other performance data that they offer in the new Google Business Profile (GBP) dashboard. Google has not released their reasonings for the soon-to-be discontinued feature, and they have not yet mentioned anything about photos in their recent article regarding the changes to Insight data.
The Importance of GBP Photos Moving Forward
With this change coming to GBP Photo Insights, many question whether or not they should continue to add photos to their Google Business Profile at all. It is very important from a user perspective to share images pertaining to your business – such as images of your products, services, staff, building, etc. GBPs with more photos do typically get more business and website interaction. According to a study conducted by BrightLocal, Google Business Profiles with a high number of images get substantially more traffic than the average business. To be exact, GBPs with more than 100 images get 520% more calls, 2,717% more direction requests, and 1,065% more website clicks than the average business with less photos.
It is rather unfortunate that, moving forward, business owners won’t be able to see how well photos are performing and how this relates to more engagement for a profile. Perhaps this could be reversed if many people make suggestions and send feedback regarding this matter.