Your Google Business Profile is doing more than you think
A Google Business Profile is a business's profile inside Google's ecosystem. It brings together the address, opening hours, phone number, website, images and customer reviews in one place. Customers can add their own photos to a profile too, meaning the profile continues to grow even without direct input from the business.
For most local businesses, this profile is often the first point of contact. Before calling or visiting, people check reviews, browse photos and look for practical information. That happens whether or not the business has ever run an ad.
Leadzai's platform works directly with your Google Business Profile, but the profile itself is what determines whether everything else performs. A location extension or a Maps ad cannot make up for missing reviews, outdated business hours, or an incomplete profile. Advertising builds on your Business Profile, it doesn't replace it.
How location extensions help customers find you faster
Location extension is a Google Ads feature which allows SMBs to display their physical address, phone number, working hours and reviews within their ads. This feature became available to Leadzai users earlier this year.
In practice, it takes the information already stored in your Google Business Profile and adds it to your search ads. Potential customers can see how far your business is from them, open directions in Google Maps, call your business or read reviews, all without visiting your website first.
This feature only works with an active, correctly linked Google Business Profile. Without one, there is no location extension. Google automatically pulls information from your Business Profile, so keeping your profile accurate and up to date is just as important as optimising the campaign itself.
How location extensions unlock Google Maps
Location extensions aren't just an add-on for your ads. They also unlock another valuable placement: Google Maps.
Once a Google Business Profile is linked, campaigns become eligible to appear directly within Google Maps, alongside their usual placements, reaching people looking for a nearby business without any extra setup from the advertiser.
In other words, location extensions serve more than one purpose. Once they're enabled through a linked Google Business Profile, your advertisers gain access to this placement too, across the different types of campaigns they're already running, all from the same integration.
How Leadzai keeps everything connected
We don’t create or edit a Google Business Profile. That sits with the advertiser, or with the partner managing the client relationship.
Rather than creating or managing a Google Business Profile, we connect to an existing one. In practice, partners grant Leadzai the necessary Google permissions to access their Business Profiles, allowing the platform to identify and match the correct profiles to the campaigns.
The portfolio must be configured and shared with Leadzai for the matching process to run.
Once the portfolio is shared, the matching process runs automatically once a week. The platform identifies eligible advertisers by checking phone numbers, Place IDs and business names. If no match is found, it retries automatically, removing the need for manual work as new advertisers are added.
The impact of syncing a profile: the data
To understand the impact of linking a Google Business Profile, Leadzai's Data Engineer, Afonso Azevedo, compared two groups of campaigns from the same active pool.
- Experimental group: campaigns from advertisers whose Google Business Profile was synced.
- Control group: campaigns from advertisers whose profile was not synced.
For the experimental group, performance was measured in two windows either side of the sync date: pre-sync and post-sync. The control group has no sync date of its own, so the analysis used the most common sync date from the experimental group, 25th March, as a fixed reference point for a fair comparison. Only campaigns active for at least 30 days before and after that date were included, to keep the comparison consistent.
Campaigns were also split into low-volume and high-volume groups for each metric using the median pre-sync value as the cutoff. Campaigns at or below the median were classified as low-volume, while those above the median were classified as high-volume. This distinction helps reveal patterns that would otherwise be hidden when looking at all campaigns as a single group, providing a clearer picture of relative performance changes after the sync.
What changed after the profile was linked
Here's what changed after linking a Google Business Profile, across clicks, impressions, click-through rate and rank lost on impression share. We define “rank lost” as the percentage of impressions your ads did not receive because your Ad Rank was too low.
Smaller campaigns saw the broadest gains
Smaller campaigns experienced the clearest improvements after linking a Google Business Profile.
Clicks rose by 12%, impressions rose by 26%, click-through rate rose by 29%, and rank lost on impression share has shown a 3% improvement.
Smaller campaigns without a linked profile also grew, but the gains were consistently smaller, and their click-through rate declined rather than rose.
Larger campaigns saw more modest results
For larger campaigns, the picture is less consistent.
Clicks rose only slightly (2%), impressions stayed close to flat (0.3%), and click-through rate actually fell (11%). Rank lost on impression share improved the most in this group, decreasing by 9%. In fact, 82% of campaigns with previously high impression share loss showed an improvement.
Meanwhile, larger campaigns without a linked profile continued increasing impressions (15%) but experienced a larger decline in click-through rate (8%) and made almost no progress on rank lost impression share.
What the statistics tell us
Our Data Engineer also tested whether these differences were statistically significant, meaning unlikely to be down to chance.
Results showed that there is a statistically significant difference between campaigns from synced vs non-synced advertisers for all metrics except impressions. There were also significant differences in relative changes from low to high volume campaigns.
A result that isn't statistically significant doesn't necessarily mean nothing changed. It simply means the analysis cannot confidently rule out that the observed difference occurred by chance at a 95% confidence level.
The takeaway:
Keep your Google Business Profile working for you
- Keep the profile complete: address, hours, phone number, photos and a live stream of reviews. It is often the first thing a potential customer checks, with or without an ad running.
- Share your Google Business Profile portfolio with Leadzai. Without it, campaigns cannot be linked to a Business Profile, meaning location extensions cannot be enabled.
- Keep your Google Business Profile complete and linked. It allows your campaigns to use location extensions, making them eligible to appear on Google Maps, and our analysis suggests that campaigns with a linked profile generally achieve stronger results across clicks, impressions and click-through rate.
Linking your Google Business Profile is only part of the equation. To reap the full benefits, the profile itself must be accurate, complete, and regularly updated. Location extensions can only display the information that's already there, so keeping your profile maintained remains the foundation of effective local advertising.
Putting these insights into practice
Linking a Google Business Profile is one of the simplest ways to unlock more from a campaign. Our analysis suggests that campaigns with a linked profile consistently perform better, with the strongest improvements appearing among smaller campaigns.
For partners, the next step is simple: share your Google Business Profile portfolio with Leadzai. It's a one-time setup that allows eligible campaigns to be linked automatically as new advertisers are added, enabling location extensions and making them eligible to appear on Google Maps.
Just as importantly, encourage advertisers to keep their Google Business Profiles accurate and complete. Up-to-date business details, opening hours, photos and customer reviews all contribute to a better customer experience, and stronger local advertising performance.
The strongest results come from combining both: a linked Google Business Profile that unlocks additional campaign capabilities, and a well-maintained profile that gives potential customers the confidence to take action.
