Google has announced the addition of business location insights to its Google My Business API. The added feature will allow 3rd party apps to programmatically access location insights about a company. For instance, a third party app can easily retrieve the number of searches, views and actions that would allow a business owner to track and analyze how and where people locate the business on Google.
Developers can access up to 18 months of data for each business location. Developers can aggregate the data and build applications that set up visualizations and other insight tools to enable businesses to take effective action based on the location data. To demonstrate, Google provided an example in its blog post announcement:
"[A] coffee shop with hundreds of locations can now easily compare and understand trends across their different locatins such as number of user views, click requests for directions, phone calls, and more. They can use these insights to better allocate resources across locations and track how marketing activities affect their business."
The location insights function has previously existed within the Google My Business dashboard, where users could visualize location insights as seen below:
