Adding Fixed Ops departments to Google My Business Listings

[George Nenni]

After spending several hours watching the DealerOn's super-smart Greg Gifford at the spring DD (and taking several pages of notes), I went on a mission to establish departmental GMB listings for dealers. Greg started that Google had recently released “Departments”, and dealers can take advantage of this. You simply zoom in on the Google map to find your fixed ops departments. Google creates these, and better than trying to create yourself since if they create you can claim the listings, as children of the parent listing. He said to keep the name that was created by Google, and simply add a dash (-) plus the dealer name. Greg said you must have a unique phone number or the listing will disappear. The GMB website link should deep link to the department page (and use UTM code also to feed into Organic channel). You can then update the categories and other content, and make sure the parent and child do not have the same categories. One great benefit for dealers is that you can have separate hours of operation for sales vs. service.

So I've successfully executed Greg's playbook for a number of dealers, but my question is, why don't the departments don't show up for every dealer? I remember Greg saying that Google will create the departments based on unique local (and separate) phone numbers for parts, service, vs. sales. Hopefully not a dumb question that @Alexander Lau will zap me on, but if so, I can take it

 

[Alexander Lau]

After spending several hours watching the DealerOn's super-smart Greg Gifford at the spring DD (and taking several pages of notes), I went on a mission to establish departmental GMB listings for dealers. Greg started that Google had recently released “Departments”, and dealers can take advantage of this. You simply zoom in on the Google map to find your fixed ops departments. Google creates these, and better than trying to create yourself since if they create you can claim the listings, as children of the parent listing. He said to keep the name that was created by Google, and simply add a dash (-) plus the dealer name. Greg said you must have a unique phone number or the listing will disappear. The GMB website link should deep link to the department page (and use UTM code also to feed into Organic channel). You can then update the categories and other content, and make sure the parent and child do not have the same categories. One great benefit for dealers is that you can have separate hours of operation for sales vs. service.

So I've successfully executed Greg's playbook for a number of dealers, but my question is, why don't the departments don't show up for every dealer? I remember Greg saying that Google will create the departments based on unique local (and separate) phone numbers for parts, service, vs. sales. Hopefully not a dumb question that @Alexander Lau will zap me on, but if so, I can take it

Not me bro, Gifford is definitely the expert!

My guess, GMB is doing as you had said. If the phone number(s) are the same (across many service areas / tops) they'll not allow for a separate department OR they know that most dealers are using tracking numbers (I could be terribly wrong about that) OR the service area is hard to find on a map and doesn't have a separate address from sales OR you're not linking them right somewhere. PS, I've never had a reason to do this, but had previously wanted to and complained about it, so great idea!

Funny... automotive attribution companies will have fun trying to track all of that, ha ha! Chances are they aren't even paying attention to it.

 

[Jason]

@georgenenni In cases like yours, where GMB service department listings do not exist, you can create them and verify them. We've done this for our clients when needed.