Hands On With Google Data Studio

CHAPTER 7Viewing Local Organization Data from Google My Business

In this chapter, we will be focused on working with local business and organization data provided by the Google My Business (GMB) service. As Google surfaces more information about local entities to the search results pages, many people are getting their first impression of an organization through the GMB listings.

We will be using Data Studio to create reports to monitor these listings, and along the way, dive into third‐party data connections and mobile report design.

Google Search and the Local Organization

Google organizes entity information about people, places, and things, not just web pages. When you do a search, you often see information about these entities in a panel on the results page; this panel is referred to as a knowledge graph. For instance, if you search for “Albert Einstein,” you get a panel with information pulled from various sources about that famous person.

Google makes assumptions about the information you want based on what it can guess about your intent and context. As an example, if you search for “pizza” on a laptop, you get completely different results from the same search on your phone, and you get different results on your phone in different locations.

Google, as well as other search engines, assumes that if you search for “pizza” on your phone, you are probably looking for a restaurant or pizza delivery, so it returns references to restaurants, not web pages about pizza in general. ...