The performance report on your Business Profile is the best free data you have about local visibility. It is also frequently misread, partly because the metrics have been redefined over time and old advice still circulates.
What the report contains
Broadly two groups:
- How people found you: searches and views, and the breakdown of search terms people used.
- What people did: calls, direction requests, website clicks, booking clicks, and messages.
The second group is worth far more than the first. Actions are behaviour; views are exposure.
The definition changes
Two things to know so you do not misinterpret your own history:
- Views have been redefined. Google has moved toward counting unique users over a period rather than raw impressions, which means view counts dropped for many businesses without any real change in visibility. If you see a step change in your history around a platform update, suspect the definition rather than your performance.
- The direct, discovery, and branded breakdown has changed across versions of the reporting. Do not build a strategy on categories that may not persist.
The practical lesson: compare like with like, be suspicious of step changes that coincide with platform updates, and export your data periodically so you keep a history the platform may not.
The metrics that mean something
- Calls. The clearest signal on a clinic profile. Someone tapped to phone you.
- Direction requests. Strong intent, and useful geographically since they indicate where people are travelling from.
- Website clicks. Interest, though weaker than a call.
- Booking clicks, where you have a booking link.
- Search terms. The most under-used part of the report, covered below.
Use the search terms report properly
This shows the queries that surfaced your profile, and for an interventional practice it is genuinely strategic. Read it for three things:
- Treatment terms you are appearing for. Confirms whether your services list and categories are doing their job.
- Treatment terms you are not appearing for. Usually means a gap in your services list or a missing treatment page.
- Unexpected terms. Patients often search using different language than clinicians use. That is free vocabulary research for your website copy.
Treat term-level counts as indicative rather than precise, since the data is thresholded and rounded.
Reading it per office
Always look at each office separately. Practice-wide totals hide the thing you most need to see, which is one office underperforming its peers.
When one office lags, the causes are usually mundane and fixable: an incomplete profile, missing services, no dedicated landing page, fewer reviews, or a wrong pin. Compare the profiles field by field before concluding it is a competitive market.
Common misreadings
- Treating a view drop as a ranking loss. Check for definition changes and seasonality first.
- Celebrating rising views with flat calls. That combination usually means exposure to the wrong audience, or a profile that is not persuading.
- Reading daily figures. Noise. Use monthly.
- Ignoring seasonality. Psychiatric enquiry patterns vary through the year, so compare with the same month last year as well as last month.
- Assuming calls equal patients. They include existing patients, suppliers, and wrong numbers.
Practical routine
- Export monthly, per office, into your own record. Do not rely on the platform retaining history.
- Record calls, direction requests, and website clicks as your standing figures.
- Review search terms quarterly and feed findings into your services list and page plan.
- Annotate the log whenever you change the profile, so later movement can be attributed.
Search Console is next, and it answers a different question.