Your Google Business Profile (GBP) drives valuable clicks to your website, but in Google Analytics, this traffic often gets mislabeled as "google / organic" or "(direct) / (none)." This makes it impossible to know how effective your GBP optimization efforts really are. UTM parameters are the solution. They are simple tags you add to your URLs to tell Google Analytics exactly where your traffic is coming from.
What Are UTM Parameters?
UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are snippets of text added to the end of a URL. There are five main parameters, but for GBP, we're focused on three:
- utm_source: Identifies the source of your traffic (e.g., `google`).
- utm_medium: The marketing medium (e.g., `organic`).
- utm_campaign: The specific campaign name (e.g., `gbp`).
Creating Your Main GBP Website Link
Your main website link on your GBP profile should be tagged to identify all traffic coming from your profile. We recommend the following structure:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp
So, if your website is `https://mybakery.com`, your full GBP website link would be:
https://mybakery.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp
Use Google's Campaign URL Builder to create these links easily and avoid errors.
Tracking Google Posts and Other Links
You can get even more granular by tagging links within your Google Posts. This allows you to measure the performance of specific offers or announcements. For this, we'll modify the `utm_campaign` parameter.
- For a Summer Sale Post:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-summer-sale-post - For a New Product Post:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-new-product-post
Effortless Analytics
MyGoProfile helps you make sense of your data, showing you what works so you can do more of it.
Seeing the Data in Google Analytics 4
Once you've implemented UTM tracking, you can easily find your GBP traffic in Google Analytics 4:
- Go to **Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition**.
- In the search box above the table, type **"gbp"** and press Enter.
- The table will now be filtered to show you only the traffic from sessions where the campaign name includes "gbp."
You can now see exactly how many users, sessions, and conversions are being driven by your Google Business Profile, finally proving its ROI.