Google's Performance tab (the artist formerly known as Insights) gives every business owner free data most would have paid an agency for a decade ago — and most owners either never open it or stare at the impressions graph feeling vaguely good. Let's fix the reading.
The metrics, decoded
Impressions (Search + Maps)
How many times your profile appeared. Split matters: Search impressions include branded lookups; Maps impressions skew toward discovery. A listing with 90% Search impressions is living off people who already know it — fine for a famous brand, a warning sign for everyone else.
The search queries report
The most valuable screen in the product: the actual words people searched before seeing you. Read it monthly for two things — branded vs discovery ratio (how much of your visibility is new-customer visibility?) and missing terms (services you offer that never appear = relevance gaps, usually fixable with categories and named services).
Calls, direction requests, website clicks
The action metrics — these are leads, not impressions of leads. Track them as a monthly trend, not a daily mood ring; local search has strong weekly and seasonal rhythms.
The two ratios that diagnose problems
1. Actions ÷ Impressions (your profile's conversion rate)
Total actions divided by total impressions. Healthy local profiles typically convert around 3–7% depending on category. The diagnosis matrix: high impressions + low actions = a visibility-rich, persuasion-poor profile (usually photos, rating, or incomplete info — your impression is being seen and rejected). Low impressions + high ratio = the profile persuades but can't get seen (a relevance/ranking problem — categories, services, reviews). Different problems, different fixes, and the ratio tells you which one you have.
2. Discovery share, trended
Discovery impressions as a share of total, tracked monthly. Growth here is what "local SEO is working" actually looks like in the data — you're surfacing for people who didn't know you existed.
What the data can't tell you (gaps to know about)
Numbers are thresholded and rounded (small listings see suspiciously tidy figures). Multi-tap journeys get simplified. "Desktop vs mobile" splits matter little for decisions. And the keyword report hides long-tail queries below a volume floor — your weirdest, most-convertible searches are invisible. Treat the data as directional, monthly, and comparative — not as accounting.
From reading to acting
A monthly 15-minute ritual: check the two ratios, scan queries for gaps, note the trend. Then fix what the ratio implicated — persuasion problems respond to photos and review velocity; visibility problems respond to category work and named services. If you'd rather the reading and the prescribing happened automatically, that's the free AI audit — it pulls your performance data, finds the gap, and tells you which lever you're leaving unpulled.