Local Business Statistics with Google Local Business Center
Yesterday Google added a great feature to their Local Business Center listings. It’s a dashboard for the business owner that provides some really valuable statistics. You can now find out how many people saw your listing when they searched a particular keyword phrase. You can also see how many took an action with an action being defined as clicked through to your website, clicked to get mor information from Google on your local listing or clicked for driving directions. You can also find out what zip code they were in if they clicked for driving directions. Google also gives you additional tips on how to improve your listing and tells you how complete your listing is.
Of course this should just be the tip of the iceberg for the dashboard and the stats you should be able to get. While they include which keywords lead to how many impressions, they do not give the far more valuable statistic of which keywords lead to which actions and how many of which actions. Obviously they have this data and it is difficult to understand why they aren’t including it, when they know how valuable that would be to small businesses.
In addition to leaving out critical data, they also have not given a clear enough explanation of how they’re measuring data. Since they now include a 10 pack in their organic listings for certain terms even without a modifier (e.g. if you search the term plumber without a geographical modfier you’re still likely to get a 10-pack listing in the universal search) it would be nice to know if they’re including these results in your local business center dashboard.
Lets hope that they offer more data and more clarificaiton in the near future. In the meantime you can read more on what Google has to say about the new dashboard here.