Google Places... Please help I'm going crazy!

[trickshotric]

Hello and thank you in advance for hopefully elimination my madness!

I have 2 issues with Google Places:

1. My stats show over 4500 impressions yet only 3 Actions (see attached image) Surely this can't be right? We come up No.1 on the map listing when you type in Air Conditioning and many other terms (image also attached).  I'm at a loss to explain this, any musings will be much appreciated!

2. I updated my photos 2 weeks ago and they are still showing the very old ones!! Please help! Images also attached.

Thank you! I will dance for the person who solves this!

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[Ant71]

Cant answer question 1,

For question two ive had similar happen with information ive updated not showing. It turned out I had two profiles, one was the owner and one was a different account that had "manage" status. I had to change both of the them to keep it inline. Which was a bit weird and now I try to avoid two profiles with editor privileges.  Do you have another account that can also update your profile?

[altecdesign]

Question 1:

1.) The impression/actions screen is actually very inaccurate (even according to google, they are "working" on it). We do a lot of paid advertising and therefor have access to a few different representatives @ google and have asked about this on multiple occasions.  Their best answer was to check webmaster tools ranking performance data to get a good idea of what you are ranking for "locally" and to get an idea of the traffic.  I know that is a pretty lame answer, but its the one we have gotten from google on 2 or 3 different occasions.

2.) It can take 2-3 weeks for changes you make to places pages to appear (crazy right!).  But if it's only been 2 weeks I would just give it a little more time.  One quick note though, if you already had photos on the account and just added 1 or 2 more, those will show up and the end and might not be showing up on the main page view.  In order to organize the photos exactly how you want to you have to upload them in the exact order you want them to display. Another thing to consider is getting a Google trusted photographer to come out and shoot  photos/a virtual tour.  It typically cost's ~300-400 dollars, but they upload the virtual tour and photos for you and will make sure everything loads exactly how you want it too.  *if you do the virtual tour a cool idea we have done for a couple clients is to hide small items in the store, and then run social promotions using your virtual tour, so you could say for example hide an envelope in your store and then later on Facebook say "the first person to find the envelope of 2 football tickets in our store gets them"

[abynavgulyani]

I have been ranking national in a Non US market similarly. In total their are 8800 impresssions in total in my Places account but a very low action rate similar to yours.

The reasons for this  can be that they are generic keywords showing on local results. So, mostly people who take any action on these kinds of listings are probably searching uniquely for local combinations of similar keywords.

I was surprised to see that the niche that I targeted was having one box listings, 3 box listings (all mine) and a combination of so many local and national combinations showing my Places Listing. But, still not much activity apart from people directly calling after looking at the Places listing.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Richard,

Unfortunately, the Google Places stats cannot be relied upon. They have never been accurate. There was a big shakeup in March in which tons of businesses saw a big drop, and right now, with the migration to the new Places for Business dashboard, it's likely that further inaccuracies are occurring. So, while you can take a look at the data for some idea of your impressions, you can't really trust what it reports. Here is a thread that on this topic from the Google and Your Business Forum that you might find reassuring, inasmuch as you can see that you are not alone:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/qn0rL72CDgA

Obviously, any business owner needs to make sure that their listing is in compliance with the Google Places Quality Guidelines and that there are no issues going on with duplicate listings, but in general, G Place Analytics simply aren't accurate.

Regarding photos - with the old Google Places Dashboard, image updates can take up to 6 weeks to appear. With the new dashboard, they are supposed to go live in a matter of hours or days. So, this should improve.