Google launches free dashboard for local businesses

Tuesday 02 June 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

In a bid to encourage more small businesses to list themselves in Google Local, the Mountain View giant has released a free analytical tool – a dashboard, in Google parlance – that will give business owners useful feedback on the performance of their firm in terms of local search.

The dashboard, now available to all firms registering in Google's Local Business Centre, helps business owners understand where their visitors are coming from and how they found them in the search results. The statistics reveal gems such as how often people visit your site, your top search queries, how many times people asked for driving directions and the towns and even postcodes the searchers are from.

According to the Google Press Centre, the new Local Business Centre (LBC) dashboard will provide the following data on activity in Google Search and Google Maps:

Impressions: the number of times the business listing appeared as a search result on Google.com or Google Maps in a given period.

Actions: how many times users interacted with the listing, eg the number of times users clicked through to the website

Top search queries: which queries led users to the business listing; for example, whether more customers are finding the listing for a cafe by searching for 'tea' or 'coffee'.

Postcodes: lists and maps of the postcodes users are coming from when they request directions to a listing.

The LBC dashboard will be pre-populated at launch with Google data from the past 30 days, and it will then be updated daily. All data available in the dashboard will be anonymous and aggregated, so no individual Google user data will be shared.

Google Local Business Centre

Image courtesy of google.com

Such information should be gold dust for businesses relying almost exclusively on local trade, allowing them to pinpoint postcodes that generate them most business and geographical areas which may be beneficial for expansion. This is the platform on which Google aims to get its benefit from the freebie – namely, pushing its Google AdWords service to improve search visibility for such businesses. In the short term, Google will also benefit from simply driving small businesses to verify their listings, making their database more accurate and so more useful to searchers. Of course, the more complete Google's listings are, the more people will use them and the more powerful Google Local will become.

Certainly, Gosh! Media predicts that the free dashboard service – which is being promoted on line via a YouTube video – will result in greater interest from SMEs in how search affects trading. According to the news website Information Week, Carter Maslan, Google's Director of Product Management for Local Search, said, "The big eye-opener for some local businesses is going to be that more than 80% of online visitors start at search."

Although Google's Local Business Centre is available in 36 different countries, this new facility is currently only available in the US and the Mountain View bods have not yet revealed when the roll-out to other countries is planned.

Back to industry news