Google Maps Introduces 4 New Features to Improve the User Experience

Google Maps has rolled out four new features recently in order to enhance the experience for users along with businesses who actively utilize the platform to reach customers.

Here’s all you need to know about this new Google Maps update and how it can benefit you or your business.

New Messaging Capabilities

To make communication easier between users and businesses, Google has added a messaging feature to Maps and Search.

Businesses that have a verified profile can now message the customers from the Google Maps app directly. Messages sent by customers will show up in the Updates tab in the business messages section.

You can turn on or off the messaging feature by visiting the Settings panel of Google Maps and Google My Business apps.

Google will be introducing new capabilities that will allow the businesses to see and respond to customers on desktop using the messaging feature added to the Search directly.

Meanwhile, users can use business messaging from search results with an update to Google posts.

Besides clicking on the message icon in a business’ profile, users can initiate a conversation from any post made in Google My Business now.

Updated Performance Insights

A few months ago, Google released a new set of performance insights to Google My Business, and now it is adding more metrics to it.

The new insights will track the performance of a business by gauging the total number of customer engagements started off from Maps and Search.

Moreover, Google is also adding more data to their performance insights that will let businesses see the search queries users are performing to find their business listing in Maps and Search.

The dataset will monitor the following information:

• Total number of searches that prompted your business listing
• Whether your business’ performance has increased or declined compared to the previous year
• A list of search queries or keywords customers used to find your business
• The total number of times each keyword or search query triggered your business profile

In addition to this, Google will also be adding more data early next year, allowing businesses to see whether users viewed their business via Maps or Search and whether they viewed it on a desktop or mobile device.

Businesses will be able to access all performance data for up to six months.

New Community Feed

The company is also adding a new community feed in the Explore tab of Google Maps.

In this section, you can see the latest reviews, photos, and posts that local experts, people you follow, and businesses serving food and drinks have recently added to Google Maps.

In case your business falls within the food and drinks industry, this gives you all the more reason to keep your business listing up-to-date.

The more frequently you post or add other types of content to your business profile, the more frequently you might appear in other users’ community feed, which is good exposure for your business.

Street View User Contributions

The company is currently running a pilot experiment of a new feature that lets users contribute imagery to Street View using their mobile devices only.

People can use the Street View app and record a series of connected images while passing through a street or path.

Once they record and post the footage to the Street View app, Google will rotate, position, and arrange the images in a sequence automatically.

This feature might turn out to be quite beneficial for businesses located in areas that don’t have great street view coverage. Users can also utilize this feature to post updated images of the outside of their business to the Street View app.

The beta version of the Street View connected photos feature is now available for users using the app with a select range of compatible Android devices in a few regions. It will be rolled out for the general public shortly.

Conclusion

Google is always updating its platform and apps with new features in an attempt to make things as simple and convenient as possible for its users. This time it has brought in some great features to enhance the user experience on Google Maps. With the release of these four amazing features discussed above, the business and customer interactions will be made much simpler on Maps and Search. The businesses will be able to reach their customers better and vice versa.