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Businesses are using the Google Maps Platform across different teams, brands and departments. With that comes rigorous reporting to stakeholders about the company spend on the platform.
A large organisation with subsidiary companies may want to report on each company’s Google Maps usage. Alternatively, they may want to dive further into what department within a subsidiary company has a high spend rate and whether this aligns with their revenue.
To help businesses understand how they can report on Google Maps Platform usage, we’ve outlined three ways to monitor usage: By project, by channel or through a personalised billing dashboard.
By Project
When setting up an account on the Google Maps Platform, projects can be generated with an assigned project number. Within a project, users can enable Maps APIs, create API keys and make API requests. Businesses can name these projects according to different brands, departments or Google Maps use cases.
For example, Bob works in the e-commerce team at The Grocery Store, a major chain of supermarkets in Australia. Bob has set up three projects under their Google Maps account labelled: “Food delivery service”, “Customer loyalty program” and “Store locator”, all using the suite of Google Maps APIs.
With the projects now configured, users have the ability to report on usage and spend in the “Billing” section of the Google Maps Platform. Businesses can utilise this information to understand the individual costs of each project to the business.
While configuring projects may require more time upfront, the ability to monitor all API usage and control individual access makes this method extremely worthwhile in the long term.
To filter a billing report by project, simply use the Group by: Project filter.
By Channel
Google Maps has recently updated its usage monitoring to include a channel level with up to 999 channels available. These channels are attached to each API call, enabling the business to report on the number of calls made through each channel.
This means that Bob from The Grocery Store can create a channel for each of his stores that has a ‘store locator’ embedded in its website, this helps Bob understand which store is attracting the most usage.
However, one limitation of using channels is that there is currently no channel data available for:
Autocomplete without Places Details – Per Session
Autocomplete (included with Places Details) – Per Session
Geolocation
To filter a billing report by channel:
- Use the Group by: SKU filter.
- Click on the Labels caret.
- Click on the Key dropdown and select: goog-maps-channel
- Click on the Value dropdown and select the numerical channels you want to filter
- Users can also Group by Label key: 'goog-maps-channel' to view the Google Maps spend of each channel.
By billing dashboard
For large organisations, stakeholders who monitor Google Maps usage with projects and channels may wish to limit the number of users who have access to this information.
With multiple projects spanning across several departments, it’s a tedious process to log in and out of each project separately to access each different department’s Google Maps usage and the attributed spend.
The Liveli team has created a personalised billing dashboard (built on Google Cloud BigQuery and Data Studio) that helps stakeholders get the essential overview they need of all of their Google Maps projects. The dashboard shows the spend broken down by time period and API in one easy and shareable view.
How do we decide which reporting method to use?
The team at Liveli would recommend taking the time to understand which level of reporting is best suited to your businesses needed.
Liveli is a Google Cloud Partner with a specialisation in location-based services and is here to offer support from project implementation through to optimisation of your Google Maps Platform.
If you would like to discuss how these methods can best work for your business, please reach out to team@liveli.com.au.
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