New York — Seeking to capture more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local, has started giving local merchants the ability to access data through a new dashboard called Local Business Center, a service that allows business owners to enhance their business listings in Google Maps search results and in other searches, attempting to analyze why so many people in a particular neighborhood are searching for pizza.
The software package would supply business owners with information about how visitors came across their local listings. To tempt them, starting tomorrow Google would allow small businesses to create a small Web listing that appears next to queries such as “Pizza San Francisco,” which pop up in Google Maps with a link to a local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics through a service called Local Business Center.
The dashboard “shows statistics on how local listings are found across Google properties,” said Carter Maslan, director of product management for local search at Google.
For instance, San Francisco pizza parlors will be able to see the zip codes from which searches originate that ends up at their listing, the keywords that searches are using to find their result, and basic stats about search activity, Maslan said. The idea is to serve those businesses with a set of metrics from which they can make business decisions about expanding delivery areas, advertising in certain areas, or what people are looking for in a local pizza joint.
Just as Google Analytics provides business owners with information about visitors to their Web sites, the new dashboard provides business owners with information about how visitors came across their local listings.
“It helps businesses examine how customers are finding them,” Maslan said, noting that the dashboard offers unprecedented access to search data across Google’s services, from GOOG-411 to Google Maps to Google Search.
“The big surprise for some local businesses is going to be that more than 80% of online visitors start at search,” he said.
“It is that kind of new visibility into search patterns that we hope will help business owners,” Maslan said. This feature is not associated to any of the accounts that businesses might have with Google’s AdWords or AdSense programs.
Google intends to extend online analytics to world of offline merchants, Maslan said. He compares the service to Google Trends, a similar effort to expose search data. And he notes that no personal data is included.
“We have done all the scrubbing to keep it free of any personally identifiable information,” he said.
Google Local Business Center listings are available to any merchant willing to go through Google’s verification processes. The listings are available in 36 countries, but the new dashboard is currently only available to businesses in the United States.
According to Maslan, the dashboard service is gradually being rolled out Monday to those in the U.S. with Local Business Center accounts, with support for additional countries coming later.
The new dashboard for Google’s Local Business Center now comes with a lot more data. (Credit: Google)