One of the most important things after you have registered your business is to know how much traffic this will get to your website. I’ve put up a very thorough tutorial on Mike Blumenthal’s blog and I suggest you all check it out.

I’ll put up a part here in this post to give you guys a preview of what I am talking about. This part is about adding URL parameters to your Local Business Center URL’s. In the full article you will also learn how to track the vertical ‘maps.google.com’ and the 3-click-path traffic from the Universal Search results.

Feel free to leave a comment here or on Mike B’s blog!

Track URLs in Local Business Center

First of all, we want to track the URLs in the Local Business Center. The Local Business Center provides very basic information. Impressions and Views. Google is very vague in their answers in the help groups/forum on what an impression or a view actually mean. Does it account universal search traffic as well? or just directly Google Maps related views/clicks? And is this data accurate? We will decide to monitor this not from the Local Business Center but rather with Google Analytics.

Imagine your business has 2 store locations. Each in a different city/state. Your website has one URL www.example.com.

We will give each location a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, we will create a ‘virtual’ campaign in GA for our local listing.

In order to do this we will use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in your specific location URL. the campaign source (in this case; google), the campaign medium (maps) and give it a campaign name, for example local_location_1.

Now copy the full URL and enter it in the Local Business Center for that specific listing. Everything should work okay (although the URL might be a bit long for the LBC to display it properly). Note that Google Maps will only display the part of the URL before the parameters!

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

You can do the same using a 301 redirect. (this is my preferred method, but you will have to know how 301 redirects work. ) Using 301 redirects you will be able to have a clean URL in your local business center.

In this case the Google Local Business Center contains the following URL :

www.example.com/locationpage

Google Maps will display :

www.example.com

clicking on the link in Google Maps will actually bring you to :

www.example.com/location/city/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=local&utm_campaign=local_location_1

That’s it to track your Local Business using a virtual Campaign!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Tracking Local Search traffic using Analytics

Just before the weekend Google decided to launch a new help center. This time it is one that is well appreciated by small business owners and us local search people. Its a Help resource on how to set up the Local Business Center.
You can find the all new help resource at the following link:
Local Business Center User Guide. Here is that video that was accompanied with it:

the video has been set to private and is no longer available.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

New Help Resource for Local Business Center

As part of catching up with writing I wanted to mention something that Google has launched since beginning of march. GA-IQ is a test, for people who use Google Analytics. You can take an individual test to set a score and receive a certificate from Google when qualified. The test is mainly focused on implementation, measuring campaigns and usage of reports. Because interpretation of the data must always be done by humans there is a strong responsability for people working with Analytics data.

Google has put up a new website with learning material, both in written text and screencasts. Learn more about this by visiting the conversion university website.
In order to pass the test you need a minimum score of 75%. I can hereby notify you that I passed the test with a score of 92%.

Do you think you are also up for it? Take the test here.
When finished (or when you decide not to take the test) try and see if you are up for tracking some of your local campaigns using Google Analytics. I wrote an article called ‘Tracking Local Search traffic using Analytics‘ on Mike Blumenthal’s blog.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Analytics Individual Qualification