Google Posts First Impressions

Google Posts First Impressions

“Google Posts” is finally available to all Google My Business listings. Posts allow you to share information when your listing appears in both Google search and Google maps results (Desktop, Mobile and Google Apps).  Google announced the rollout on June 22nd here.

Google Posts allows you to share items like current vehicle incentives and drive traffic to your desired landing page to provide further details.

You can showcase your dealership or current offers – the choice is yours.

How To Create Google Posts

Go to your Google My Business account and clicks on “Posts” on the left-side menu.

Your screen should look something like this:

When writing a post, you are given several options:

• Upload an image
• Write text (max 300 words)
• Add an event title with start and end dates
• Pick a call-to-action button from the available list
  • Learn More
  • Reserve
  • Sign Up
  • Buy
  • Get Offer

This is what the post editing screen looks like:

You can find complete help docs from Google here.

This is how your Google Posts will appear when users Google your business (desktop example).

Recommendations

Though these are fairly new, we do have some early numbers and suggestions.  We analyzed 19 dealers covering 5 different OEMs in the month of July who had created at least 1 Google Post.

1. Use the URL Builder to tag the url you use.  This will allow you to see the traffic coming from the post in Google Analytics, and what happens after they click.  Without doing so, you will be able to see stats when you view the post in Google My Business, but you will only see views and clicks, nothing more.   Google Analytics and tagging will allow further analysis about what these visitors did after clicking your “post”.
2. The “Learn More” Call-To-Action (CTA) has a higher click-through-rate (CTR) than “Get Offer” in our analysis.  More stats further below.
3. When you have multiple posts, the newest ones will show first; the older posts will show in a carousel format.

Results

We analyzed 66,796 views of Google Posts containing vehicle incentives/offers on dealer listings in July. The overall click-through-rate was 0.17%. Not great, but it’s early stages so far, that could be the norm.  All the Posts were new vehicle incentives.

When selecting a CTA, we found “Learn More” had a higher CTR than “Get Offer” based on the limited data we have.

Call-To-Action	Views	Clicks	CTR
Learn More	35,106	81	0.23%
Get Offer	28,030	32	0.11%

More experimenting is required, but keep those quick tips in mind when creating your new Google Posts.