Popular Times on Your Google Listing

A graph you did not make

Search for a coffee shop, a store or a restaurant on a phone, and the Google listing often includes a bar chart: how busy the place usually is at each hour, for each day of the week.

The owner did not make it and cannot edit it. Google builds it from anonymous visit data, collected from phones whose owners have location history turned on.

Customers use it more than most owners realise, to decide when to come and sometimes whether to come at all.

So it is worth knowing what yours says, and what it leaves out.

What the graph shows

Popular times appears on listings that receive enough visits from phones to draw a reliable picture. Quieter businesses often have no graph at all.

The bars show how busy each hour usually is compared with the busiest hour of the week. They are relative, not a count of people.

So a tall bar at a small shop may mean a handful of customers, while a short bar at a large store may still mean a crowd.

Since late last year, some listings also show a live reading of how busy the place is right now compared with usual, and how long people typically spend there.

The usual bars describe the past several weeks of visits. They know nothing about tomorrow.

What customers read into it

• When to avoid, by spotting the tallest bars and coming another time.
• Whether you are popular, since a full graph suggests a place people like.
• How long the wait might be, judged from the height of the bar.
• Whether you are open, since empty hours can look like closed ones.
• When to come for a quiet visit, such as with small children.

The first is the one that changes behaviour. People who dislike queues move to the quieter hours, and the graph never says why those hours are quiet.

Why quiet hours are quiet

An hour is quiet for a reason, and the reason is not always good news for the customer.

In a bakery the quiet afternoon may be quiet because the shelves are nearly empty. In a restaurant the slow hour may be when the kitchen runs a shorter menu.

A customer steered to that hour by the graph has a worse visit than one who came at the peak and waited a few minutes.

The graph cannot tell them that. You can.

A worked example

A doughnut shop in a commuter town makes its doughnuts fresh from five in the morning, in batches until about eleven, and closes at four.

Its listing's popular times showed tall bars on weekday mornings and on Saturday from nine to noon, and short bars every afternoon.

Afternoon customers kept arriving to find a half-empty case, and some left disappointed reviews saying the shop had run out of everything. Several said they had come at a quiet time on purpose, to avoid the line.

The graph was accurate. It just did not mention that the shop sold out.

The shop added a short section to its website about when fresh batches come out and when the case usually empties, with a note about ordering a dozen ahead for afternoon pickup.

Staff began mentioning that the morning line moves quickly. Afternoon visitors now arrive knowing what to expect, or order ahead.

Use it for staffing

For the owner, the graph is a free second opinion on something you mostly know already.

Compare it with your own till records by hour. Where they agree, you have confirmation. Where they differ, there is usually a reason worth understanding.

A graph that shows visits rising before your sales do may be showing people waiting in line. Busy hours with few sales may be showing people who came, looked and left.

Either is useful for deciding when to add a second person behind the counter.

What the graph gets wrong

The graph is built from past weeks, so it lags behind any change. New hours, a new location or a new menu take weeks to show.

It knows nothing about holidays, events or the weather, and a busy December can leave the January graph looking odd for a while.

And it reflects only the visitors whose phones contribute data, which is a sample of your customers rather than all of them.

Tell customers what it cannot

Your website can carry what the graph leaves out: when the best selection is available, when the line is longest but fastest, which hours are quiet and still fully stocked.

Keep it short and plain, on the page people check before visiting, usually the hours or location page.

Make sure the hours on the listing itself are right, including any holiday hours. A customer reading the graph for a quiet hour is reading the opening hours beside it too.

When the graph helps you

For some businesses the graph does useful work on its own. A gym, a swimming pool or a hardware store would often rather spread customers across the day, and the graph nudges people that way.

If your quiet hours are as good as your busy ones, say so on the website. The graph has already made the suggestion; your site can confirm it.

The counter-case

Many small businesses have no graph at all, because Google lacks enough visits to draw one. Businesses that work by appointment, trades that visit customers and offices rarely need to think about it.

And where the graph matches your own sense of the day, and your quiet hours are fine, there is little to do beyond glancing at it now and then.

For a business whose quiet hours really are different, though, the advice holds: use the graph for staffing, and tell customers what it cannot.

Reading your own graph

1. Look up your listing on a phone.
2. Read your popular times for each day.
3. Compare it with your till records by hour.
4. Note why quiet hours are quiet.
5. Add best-time advice to your hours page.
6. Check the listing's hours are correct.
7. Adjust staffing where the graph and records agree.

Step four decides everything after it. If the quiet hours are quiet because something has run out or closed, customers need to hear it from you before the graph sends them.

The question of when to come in, answered once on the website, follows the same logic as a page for the question every caller asks.

Frequently asked questions

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