Ireckon are massive fans of Google Local Business listings (LBLs) and they are an important source of web traffic for us (and many of our clients). However, it has traditionally been hard (though not impossible) to gather and monitor statistics associated with our LBLs.
In June 2009, Google released a set of statistics to users in the United States that provides a wealth of information about Local Business Listing traffic – although this has not been available to Australian users – until last weekend that is.
Over the weekend Google released this very useful feature to Australia (and possibly elsewhere too – add a comment if you also now have access), so you can now find out more information than ever about how users get to your website.
This post provides an outline of how to access your LBL stats, and provides a quick guide on how to use and interpret this data.
If you have not already claimed your Local Business Listing – you had really better do something about that. Please go to the Google Local Business center for info on how you can set one up yourself for free. We also offer a Local Business Listing Setup service for a small fee.
Local Business Listing Stats
To access your LBL stats – simply login to your Local Business Center and if you've got access to the stats – you should see a "New! View Report" link in the statistics for each listing. Note: If you don't already have this link it may mean that Google is still rolling out this feature – so be patient, and try again in a few days.
Clicking on the "View report" Link presents you with the LBL dashboard containing a variety of graphs and data tables.
Local Business Listing Activity
The first thing you will probably notice is the Activity report, which a graphical representation of your “Impressions” and “Actions” for this particular listing over time.
Impressions are the number of times your listing was displayed by Google search results – though unfortunately the stats do not differentiate between Google Search and Google Maps results. Each time your business listing is shown as a local search result on Google or Google Maps the impression counter will increase. Impressions count 1, 3, and 10-packs shown as part of Universal Search Results, as well as searches performed on maps.google.com.
The second graph shows Actions – which are essentially the frequency of clicks to either your website – or for more information about your listing on Google Maps.
By default the Action and Impression graphs display data for the last thirty days, but you can select data for the last 7 days – or define your own reporting period if you wish (although the data on our accounts only seem to to start from 22 July 2009)
Note: in the United States, clicking for driving directions is also considered an action – and you can find out what area (zip code) the user was in – but this feature doesn't (yet) appear to be available in Australia.
Local Business Listing Queries
The "Top Search Queries" section of the dashboard provides information about the top 10 queries that your listing is appearing for in the search results. You can see out how many people saw your listing when they searched a particular keyword phrase.
This section only displays the top 10 queries – although – in many cases the "other" queries section accounts for a significant number of impressions, so it would be useful to be able to drill down into this.
Business Info
In addition to the statistical data, the report page includes a panel displaying some of the information associated with your listing – along with a "% Complete" indicator. The data is a summary of the information you provided when you created your listing, and the % complete indicator provides a guide as to how 'complete:" your listing is. There seems to be no evidence whether a 100% complete listing is likely to rank better or be displayed more often that an incomplete listing – however, it makes sense for you to include as much relevant information in your listing as you can.
Finally Google also provides some links to their help pages on other ways you can go about Improving your listing :
All in all – this is a long anticipated feature that will help you to understand (and improve) the way that users get to your website. The LBL Dashboard provides a wealth of useful information – but there is still scope for improvement – hopefully this is an area that Google will be expanding on in the future.
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