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

This is a public safety warning.

Google indexes public notebooks. Their robots.txt shows Google doesn’t disallow this. They only prevent the search results from being indexed, as you can see on the following image, or by looking directly at robots.txt

As some recent small research from Arjan Snaterse has pointed out, these notebooks can be used to influence ranking. As we look into the results in google of indexed notebooks, we can already see big amounts of spam appearing.

Now I’m wondering what Google’s goal is to be indexing these notebooks. To me some people’s personal notes don’t add up to my user experience, especially when they are cluttering up the results with big fat cans of spam. While you might not see these ranking on first page in Google.com. They do appear in Microsoft’s Live Search.

Now why is this article called “Google Notebooks and security“?
Not only do these Notebooks have contain Spam. These notebooks also contain people’s private account information. Usernames, Passwords, Grocery lists, everything is stored in these notebooks and it is being made easy by Google themselves by providing plugins to easily add content to your notebook from within Firefox.
Ofcourse we can argue if its the notebook user their own fault, storing their private information inside these notebooks. But Google needs to make it more clear to users that whenever they Share their notebook with anyone, their information get’s public. Same goes for your Google Reader shared items by the way. By using some creative Google queries you will be able to gain access to merchant accounts, people’s private email. etc.

My opinion? Google, take some action and prevent this from happening, take responsibility in this! Make it more clear to users that their information is Public and prevent fraud from happening.

Thijs Bosschert, an expert on security and IT forensics, argues:
“People don’t seem to know that ‘sharing’ your notebook means that you make the data in it public. This means that before you know it someone will find your grocery list with a Google query. Or worse, your account information you had put there to remember it.”

Legal Disclaimer: any action/activity that gets carried out or envolves from the posting listed above, is not my responsibility. The information provided is of informative purpose only.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Notebooks and Security – a wake up call