6.1. What to Measure and with Which Tool

One minute on the six metrics that turn into revenue. Details begin below.

The six metrics that turn into money

Your pizzeria needs six numbers, not forty: calls, direction requests, website clicks, menu clicks, reservations, and messages. All six capture the intent to dine: someone asking for directions to your Álamos location on a Friday at 8 PM is going to drive right over.

Views and impressions don't cut it: they climb month after month without a single extra diner walking in.

Google Business Profile: the report is called Performance

The “Insights” dashboard was retired on February 20, 2023. Today, you go to your Business Profile and then to Performance: Interactions, Calls, Messages, Bookings, Directions, Website clicks, Views, and Searches, plus Menus for food businesses. If your listing isn't complete, go back to 3.1 Google My Business before tracking.

Two limits that change your routine. The report only stores 6 months: export to a spreadsheet every month, because by the seventh, the first one is gone. And Search updates at the beginning of the month with up to a 5-day delay: a report pulled on day 1 is incomplete; finalize it on day 6.

Categorizing searches into direct, discovery, and branded no longer exists in the dashboard or the API; anyone promising it to you today copied outdated material. What is currently active is the Searches list, showing the actual queries that led to your listing: “pizza near me,” “pizza delivery Juriquilla.” Compare it against what you selected in 1.1 Identify keywords.

Search Console: what people search before finding you

Performance and then Search results: four metrics—Clicks, Impressions, Average CTR, and Average position—across the Queries, Pages, Devices, and Dates dimensions.

The real utility is the filter, not the overview: Queries containing “Querétaro”, your neighborhood, or “near me”, cross-referenced with the Page filter for your menu. Without that, the report mixes the blog with the menu. If a query has a good position and low CTR, the issue is the search snippet copy and is fixed in 2.2 Meta descriptions.

Two dated warnings. Search Console keeps 16 months in a rolling window, and older data is permanently deleted. And on April 3, 2026, Google acknowledged a bug that inflated impressions from May 13, 2025 through late April 2026, without touching clicks or reconstructing the historical data: any impression or CTR comparison spanning that period is invalid. Use clicks.

GA4: what happens inside your website

As of March 21, 2024, conversions are called key events. They are marked under Admin, Data display, Events, using the star icon, and reviewed under Reports, Engagement, Events.

A restaurant rarely charges directly on the website: its measurable actions are clicks to WhatsApp, phone calls, Google Maps directions, menu views, and reservations. Instrument them with generate_lead or custom events and mark them as key events. With that data, you stop talking about traffic and start talking about conversion.

Since June 2026, linking with the profile has been native, no-code: Admin, Product links, Google Business Profile links, Link. It requires an Editor or Administrator role in GA4 and an Owner or Manager role on the profile. It pulls seven metrics—interactions, website clicks, calls, directions, messages, bookings, and menus—stores six months, and aggregates all locations without the ability to filter them.

Looker Studio: everything on one page

It's free and connects with GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, and Sheets. Build a single page: at the top, the six engagement metrics compared to the previous month; at the bottom, the list of Searches and local queries from Search Console. The Pro version costs 9 USD per user per month, and a pizzeria doesn't need it.

Nor do you need an expensive paid SEO suite: high-end tools cost over 100 USD per month, more than the full-service marketing at 2,500 pesos, and none gives you the six metrics above.

The minimum routine

On the 6th of every month: export Performance, record the six metrics, and review new reviews following 3.2 Positive reviews. Every quarter: review queries and clicks in Search Console to decide which page to rewrite. If you can't fit that into your week, that's the work you delegate to a SEO or at Google Ads campaigns, where those calls and directions are the purchased goal.