Google Places 2009 Traffic Stats: What the Google Local Business Center Tells Us

photo credit: dinimueter

Recently, we posted information on how to get listed in Google Places. If you have a local business, or even a business with a physical address, this is a listing you absolutely must have. And now you can view all sorts of awesome stats on how that Google Places listing is working for you. If you’ve already got your site listed, just login to your account at the Google Local Business Center.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll see your listing along with a column that says “Statistics”. This column has been there for a while, showing you how many times your listing showed, and how many clicks that listing received. That little bit of information has always been interesting, but just wasn’t cutting it in terms of juicy analytics data. Well now Google has added a link that says “View Report”. Just click that link and get your dose of all sorts of analytics data, including:

• Impressions: How many times users saw your listing in the Google Places results
• Actions: How many times users went beyond that listing and took some sort of action including:
  • Clicks on the “more info…” link to view more info about your business.
  • Clicks for driving directions.
  • Clicks through to your website.
• Top search queries: The top 10 keywords that generated your local listing. Pretty cool feature to tell you what people are searching for and how they’re finding your site. Do you see keywords here that you should be ranking for? Or perhaps you need to build some content around keywords that should be there but aren’t?
• Where driving directions requests come from. Ok, this one is a little big brother-y but we still like the fact that we can get an idea of where people are traveling from to visit a location. How far away are people coming to visit your location? If you have multiple locations, do users tend to visit the closest one or drive further to a specific location? This might help you determine what areas you want to do some more advertising in, open a new physical location, or even make improvements to draw more foot traffic to a specific store.
• Google even tells you how “complete” your listing is, often hinting that there is more you can do to enhance your listing such as adding images, video, hours, etc.

So give it a spin and check out the stats for your own listing. Metrics data like this can help you determine where to focus your marketing efforts and build your traffic, both online and off!