Only 1 in 9 Okanagan Contractors Tag Their Google Profile Link. We Followed All 86 Tags, and 1 in 4 Never Reach Google Analytics Intact.

Ask a contractor where their leads come from and the most common answer is “Google”. Ask which part of Google, the map listing, the regular search results or an ad, and the room goes quiet. Those are three different jobs with three different budgets, so the answer matters.

There's a simple way to separate the map listing out: a tag on the end of the website link on your Google Business Profile, called a UTM code, that tells Google Analytics “this visitor came from my profile”. On October 22, 2026, we checked how many Okanagan trades use one. We ran 64 Google searches across Vernon, Kelowna, West Kelowna and Penticton three times, collected 886 business profiles and opened every website link in a real browser to see whether the tag made it into Google Analytics.

Only 86 of the 775 profiles that link to their own website (11.1 percent, about 1 in 9) tag the link. We followed all 86. Of the 83 we could test, 21 (25.3 percent, about 1 in 4) never reach Google Analytics intact: the link is broken, the page runs no Google Analytics, or a redirect strips the tag on the way in. Only 40 arrive clean.

What We Checked, and What We Couldn't See

We searched the same 16 trades in the same 4 towns as our check of Okanagan phone numbers: roofers, plumbers, electricians, heating and air conditioning, landscapers, general contractors, painters, flooring, concrete, gutters, tree services, fencing, windows, garage doors, pest control and excavating. Each search returned up to 20 businesses, including service-area businesses that hide their address. We ran all 64 searches 3 times, minutes apart, and found 886 different business profiles. 101 list no website and 10 link to a Facebook page or a directory. The other 775 link to their own website, 723 different sites in all, because some companies have more than one profile.

Then we opened every one of those links exactly as Google lists it, tag and all, in a real Chrome-based browser. We recorded every redirect, the address the page finally landed on and every hit the page tried to send to Google Analytics. We caught each of those hits and blocked it, so our visits never showed up in anyone's reports. Every page that sent nothing was opened a second time with longer waits and more scrolling. None of those 294 pages sent a Google Analytics page view the second time either.

Know the limits before you read the numbers:

• One visit per link. One desktop visit from one connection in Canada, on a Thursday morning. We didn't tap the Website button inside the Google Maps app.
• We see what the page sends, not what happens inside your account. We read the hit each page sends to Google Analytics and applied Google's published sorting rules. A business with a custom setup inside its own account could sort things differently.
• Cookie banners can hide a tag. A banner that holds Google Analytics back until someone clicks Accept looks to us like code that never fired. We counted those separately.
• Top 20 only. These are businesses Google already shows near the top for their trade and town.
• We haven't named any business. Every number below is a total.

Only 1 in 9 Okanagan Contractors Tag the Link on Their Google Profile

86 of the 775 profiles with their own website carry a tag on the link. Bigger companies are far more likely to have one:

Google reviews	Profiles linking to their own website	Tagged	Share tagged
0 to 49	551	47	8.5%
50 to 199	172	20	11.6%
200 or more	52	19	36.5%
All	775	86	11.1%

The bigger gap is between the tool and the tag. Of the 726 websites that opened properly, 434 (59.8 percent) run Google Analytics 4, Google's free website statistics. Only 66 of those 434 (15.2 percent) tag their profile link. That leaves 368 Okanagan trades that already have Google Analytics running and still can't pick their profile visitors out from everyone else.

Another 17 sites still send their Google Analytics data only to Universal Analytics, the old version. Google's help page says “Starting July 1, 2023: Standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing hits”. Those sites have been counting nothing for more than three years. If your web person set up your statistics before 2023 and nobody has looked since, check which version you have.

What You See Without a Tag: Clicks, Not Customers

Google already gives you some numbers. If your profile is verified, its performance report counts calls, direction requests and, in the words of Google's performance help page, “Website clicks: The number of times people clicked on the website link on your Business Profile.” That's useful, but it stops at the click. It can't tell you whether the person read your roofing page, filled out your quote form or left after five seconds.

Google Analytics sees what happens on your website, but without a tag it can't tell a profile visitor from anyone else who came from Google. BrightLocal, a local SEO software company, puts it this way in its guide to tagging profile links: “Without UTM tags, traffic from your GBP will show in Google Analytics (GA) as either 'direct' or 'organic'.” Your map visitors get mixed in with people who found you in the regular search results or typed your address.

A tag joins the two. It's a few labels added to the end of the link, and Google's URL builder page lists the three that matter: utm_source (where the visitor came from), utm_medium (what kind of link it was) and utm_campaign (which link exactly). When someone taps Website on your profile, the labels ride along to your site and Google Analytics files the visit under them. If your quote form is tracked in Google Analytics, you can then count the forms that came from your profile.

Why it matters: if your map listing brings in most of your quote requests, that's where your next hour belongs, on reviews, photos and services. If it brings in very few, the problem is somewhere else. Without the tag you're guessing. For the bigger picture of following a lead from first click to signed job, see our guide to tracking marketing ROI.

We Followed All 86 Tags to the Website. Here Is Where They Went.

3 of the 86 tagged links sit behind bot walls that turned our browser away, so we couldn't test them. Here's what happened to the other 83:

What happened to the tag	Profiles	Share of 83
The link is broken: an error page or a dead domain	2	2.4%
The page sends no Google Analytics page view	15	18.1%
A redirect strips or garbles the tag before Google Analytics sees it	4	4.8%
Arrives, but lands in Unassigned or with blank labels	7	8.4%
Arrives, but the label names are written in capitals	15	18.1%
Arrives intact, label names in lowercase, filed under Organic Search	40	48.2%

Add up the first three rows and 21 of the 83 tags (25.3 percent) never reach Google Analytics intact. Someone went to the trouble of tagging the link, and the report still can't show those visitors. 7 more arrive in a bucket most owners never open. Fewer than half arrive clean.

Four Ways a Google Profile Tag Gets Lost or Misfiled

1. Nothing on the page is there to read it

15 tagged profiles link to a page that sent no Google Analytics page view on either of our visits. 13 of those pages have no Google Analytics code at all. One of them runs only a Google Ads tag, which counts ad conversions but isn't a statistics tool. The other 2 have Google Analytics code that never fired, probably held back by a cookie banner or broken. 4 of the 15 are Wix sites, and Wix has its own built-in statistics that may read the tag, but Google Analytics never sees it. A tag is a label. Something on the page has to write it down.

2. A redirect throws it away

Many profile links don't point at the page's final address. They point at an old http:// address or the version without www, and the website forwards the visitor to the right one. That forward is a redirect, and some redirects drop everything after the question mark. 19 tagged links on sites running Google Analytics went through at least one redirect, and 4 of those 19 lost or garbled the tag. Two dropped it while sending the visitor to the plain home page. One dropped it when switching from the www address to the one without. One pasted the tag on twice, so the source arrives as gibberish. None of the tagged links without a redirect lost its tag.

BrightLocal's guide warns about exactly this: “Don't link to a URL that redirects as this might strip the UTM tagging from the URL.” Check before you add a tag, too. 186 of the 368 untagged profile links on sites running Google Analytics also go through a redirect.

3. The label lands in Unassigned

Google Analytics sorts every visit into a channel, such as Organic Search, Referral or Email, using fixed rules listed on its default channel group page. A visit counts as Organic Search when its source is on Google's list of search engines (google is) “OR Medium exactly matches organic”. It counts as Referral when the medium is referral, app or link. Anything that matches no rule goes here: “Unassigned is the value Analytics uses when there are no other channel rules that match the event data.”

Across all 86 tags, 7 use labels that match no rule. 5 of the 7 carry the same label, apparently added by one outside company, with “website” or “webpage” as the medium. One uses gbp for both labels and one uses a listings company's code. 4 more leave out the source or the medium entirely, and Google's URL builder page says “Missing UTM parameters will result in (not set) values being present in reporting.” The visits still count. They just sit in Unassigned or under (not set), where an owner looking at Organic Search will never find them.

4. Capitals and missing labels

20 of the 86 tags write the label names in capitals, like UTM_source instead of utm_source. Google's URL builder page writes the names in lowercase in every example and says the values are case-sensitive: “Parameter values are case sensitive, e.g. utm_source=google is different from utm_source=Google.” It doesn't say whether capitalized names are read at all. We don't know either, so we counted the 15 of those tags that arrive as not clean rather than broken. Lowercase costs nothing.

28 tags also skip the campaign label. The same page says “When you add parameters to a URL, you should always use utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign.” If your source says gmb, the visits still stand apart. If it says google and organic, the campaign is the only label that sets your profile visitors apart from everyday Google searchers in the standard reports.

How to Tag Your Google Profile Link in 10 Minutes

1. Find your website's final address. Open your site in a browser, wait for it to finish loading and copy the address from the address bar. That's the address after any redirect, and it usually starts with https://.
2. Add the tag to the end. For most contractors it looks like this: https://www.yourcompany.ca/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp. Keep every letter lowercase. A source of google with a medium of organic keeps these visitors in Organic Search, right where they were before, and the campaign name gbp lets you pick them out. If you have more than one profile, give each its own campaign name, like gbp-vernon and gbp-kelowna. If your address already contains a question mark, join the tag with & instead of ?.
3. Test it before you save it. Paste the tagged address into a private browser window. When the page finishes loading, the tag should still be in the address bar. If it's gone, a redirect removed it. Go back to step 1 and use the final address.
4. Check that Google Analytics is on the page. With the page still open, look at the Realtime report in Google Analytics and confirm your visit shows up. No visit means no statistics on that page, and the tag has nothing to talk to.
5. Put it on your profile. Open the edit screen of your Business Profile, find the website field and paste in the tagged address. Edits can take a little while to appear.
6. Read it a week later. In Google Analytics, open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and change the first column to Session campaign. Your profile visitors show up under gbp. If your quote form is set up as a key event, you'll see how many forms came from the profile.

You can tag your appointment link the same way, with its own campaign name like gbp-booking. Calls from the Call button on your profile never touch your website, so a tag can't count them. Your profile's performance report counts those taps, and our post on call tracking and SEO covers how to track the calls themselves without hurting your listing. We tag our own profile link exactly the way step 2 shows.

Setting this up takes 10 minutes. Reading it every month is the part most owners skip. If you'd rather hand that off, Analytics management and monthly reporting are part of our local SEO plan for trades in Vernon and Kelowna, and our Google Business Profile management includes monthly performance reports.

Frequently Asked Questions