How Does Google Places (Google Local) Traffic Appear in Google Analytics?

Posted on September 21, 2010 by in Questions & Answers

Wondering how Google Analytics tracks or reports on local search traffic?  We were too.  I tried doing a few searches to find the answer, but could not find anything definitive.  So we decided to set up a little experiment to test it out…

Summary of Our Test

  1. Create brand new website on brand new domain
  2. Install Google Analytics
  3. Create Google Places Account
  4. Click through to website from the local search listing, in various ways
  5. See how Analytics records it

So to start, I created a brand new website (1-page site) on a new domain.  The site has zero inbound links, no name brand and basically zero traffic b/c no one knows it exists.  This was intentional, in order to keep the data clean for our test.  I then installed Analytics, and then set up a Google Places account for the business/website, and verified it.  I didn’t build out the Places profile very much, basically just one sentence.  The title on the local listing is the name of the business.

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