You can now join your Google profile to Analytics, and the switch is not where you'd look for it

For years the Business Profile numbers and the website numbers lived in two places that refused to acknowledge each other. Someone found you on Maps, tapped through, and became an anonymous session with no memory of where it came from.

Google now documents a link between the two. Its page on connecting your Business Profile to Google Analytics, read 3 September 2026, describes joining a profile to a GA4 property so that local listing activity sits alongside website and app data.

This post is about the mechanics — what the link needs, where it lives, and what moves across it. What to do with numbers once you have them is a separate argument, and a shorter one than most reports suggest.

The link is made in Analytics

This is the detail that sends people hunting through Business Profile Manager for a switch that is not there.

Google’s steps:

1. Go to your Google Analytics Admin page
2. Under Product links, click Google Business Profile links
3. Click Link
4. Follow the prompts to select the Business Profile or profiles you manage
5. Review the data sharing information and confirm

Business Profile is the thing being linked, not the place you link from.

Two roles, one person

Google requires both, and they come from different systems:

• Google Analytics: Administrator or Editor on the GA4 property you are linking to
• Business Profile: Owner or Manager of the profile you are connecting

Most stalls happen here, and they are boring. The web developer holds Analytics admin; the owner holds the profile; neither has both, so the link cannot be made by either of them alone. Sort the access first and the linking takes two minutes.

Worth confirming who actually holds those profile roles while you are checking, since profile access has a habit of being wider than anyone remembers.

What crosses the link

Google lists the performance data shared with the Analytics property: interactions, website clicks, calls, directions, messages, bookings, and menu clicks.

That is the profile’s activity, arriving next to the site’s. The obvious use is the one the page describes as the full customer journey — local discovery through to whatever happens on your website afterward.

One transparency detail Google documents: when a link is active, a notification banner appears on the Business Profile performance page indicating that aggregated data is being shared. If you see that banner on a profile and did not create the link, someone with the roles above did.

Multiple profiles, one property

Google states that an Analytics property can be linked to multiple Business Profiles. For a business running several locations against a single website, that is the sane configuration — and it is worth thinking through before you link, because a second location is a genuinely separate profile with its own everything.

What the link does not do

It does not create demand, and it does not tell you why a number moved. It relocates data.

That is a real convenience — one place instead of two, and the profile’s contribution visible in the same view as everything else — but it is a plumbing improvement, not an insight. The numbers that were noisy before the link are the same numbers after it, and the honest hierarchy of which ones mean anything has not changed: calls, direction requests, website clicks, new reviews.

Everything else is context, and the fastest way to waste the link is to treat a longer dataset as a better one.

Should you bother

If you already use GA4 and check it, yes — it is a free link and it removes a tab.

If you do not look at Analytics, linking will not start you. The profile’s own performance view already reports the handful of numbers worth reading, and a second dashboard nobody opens is not progress.

Sort the two roles, make the link inside Analytics, and keep reading the same four numbers. Straight reporting on what the profile actually produced is part of every plan we run.