Google has gone to great lengths lately to incorporate local data wherever it can. Google Place Search rolled out in late October and services such as Google Tags and Google Boost offer increased visibility, for a price. It’s only natural that we would want to know if investing in these add-ons is actually worthwhile.
Most of us naturally would turn to Google Analytics for the answer, but what can you do when your referral URL says only that it’s from Google? That’s a rather vague answer with a lot of different possibilities. How can we narrow it down to traffic referred only from Google Places?
To better justify the time and money spent on Google Places for our clients, I set out to find an answer.
Method #1: Redirected Landing Page
My search for a reliable tracking method began with a question: How can we track Google Places without manual tagging? I wanted to avoid tagging initially since, as an agency, my company manages hundreds of profiles. Tagging all of them would be a huge multi-departmental project. Obviously I was going to look for a simpler way first. One method suggested to me was to use a nonexistent page on the website as the URL, then 301 redirect it to the index page. It wasn’t going to solve my “huge multi-departmental project” problem, but it was an interesting thought.
Pros: It would be relatively easy to set up, easier than manual tags. The resulting URL would be clean, visually speaking.
Cons: Given the nature of the new blended algorithm, I’m reluctant to 301 the primary landing page I’m presenting to Google. It could be downgraded at best, and regarded as a doorway page at worst.
Ultimately, we didn’t test this method. The risks were simply too great.
Method #2: Manual Tagging
So I tested manual tagging instead. The Google URL Builder is a terrific tool:
In the example above, I’m using the Content field to differentiate one office location from another, but this could also be done in the Campaign field. The resulting URL is then added to the Google Places profile.
Pros: Not only is the setup relatively easy, the data presentation in Google Analytics is really clean and easy to slice up. Different business locations are easily segmented out for deeper analysis of which locations are the biggest drivers.
Isn’t it beautiful? The first thing I did once I had this was to add keywords to the mix:
Oooh… ahhh…
Cons: It appears that adding a tracking URL triggers the dreaded “Pending Review” status instead of immediately going Active. Luckily, the change was approved within a week of submission when tested. Phew! I can’t guarantee such a short wait for everyone, of course, but the Google Places team does seem to be on top of things at the moment.
A second con is that tagging can only be used to track listings which you control. We often run up against Google Places profiles which were claimed by our predecessors who are no longer contactable, or which the clients claimed once upon a time but can’t find the login info for, or which are controlled by third parties who are still working with our client on other sites… you get the idea. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t be an issue. But it is, and until those others are magically relinquished to us, we can’t track them.
A third con is that it’s impossible to tell the difference between traffic which came from the Places profile versus traffic that came from the 7-pack search results. Google sometimes pulls the URL from its index, and other times pulls it from the Places profile. To see this in action for yourself, run a search for “Houston Breast Augmentation” and hover on the first result. It goes to a “naked” URL, with no tracking on it, exactly as you would expect. Now take a look at the SERPs for “best plastic surgeons in Houston” where you find the the same business:
Aha. So this isn’t going to filter out all traffic from the SERPs. And it’s kinda ugly, too.
Method #3: Capturing The Full Referring URL + Advanced Segmentation Or On-Page Filtering
Manual tagging wasn’t going to provide me with exactly what I was after, but I remembered seeing David Harry refer to a method of capturing full referring URLs. It occurred to me that Google Places listings probably have a unique element in their URL structure which I could segment out from the rest of the noise if I (a) had the full URL and (b) knew what that unique element was.
I’m not going into how to set up the full referrer capture filter. Go to Reuben Yau’s post (linked in the paragraph above) to see how it’s done.
Once that has been set up, create an advanced segment or an on-page filter to pull out the Google Places referrals.
It turns out that there are two ways a Google Places listing can render. One version uses "maps" in the URL, while the other uses "place". At least on the surface, it looks like the difference between a normal search and a mobile search. My filter looks like this:
Pros: Since the filtering works on the basis of the URL structure, profile control is unnecessary.
Cons: It took me awhile to figure out why the manual tagging method and full referrer methods were putting up different numbers, but finally I realized that the full referrer method does NOT include the 7-pack results. If you want to include 7-pack clicks, the full referrer method won’t do it for you. The data isn’t presented in such a pretty, clean way, and there’s no simple way to segment out traffic coming through different office locations. It can be done, it’s just a bit of a headache since it involves filtering for specific “cid” numbers from the URLs and knowing which insanely long number belongs to which location. The setup is a little more intense, too.
Method #4: Using Both Manual Tagging and Full Referrer Methods Together
Using both is how I got to this:
Between the two, you have almost everything you could ever want to slice and dice. I used a simple filter grab Google Places and manually tagged URLs and exclude SERPs traffic:
The filter works because it relies on the full referring URL to provide the bits to be filtered in and out. Once it’s in place, you can slice and dice your Google Places referral data to your heart’s content.
A caveat to using the manual tagging like that is having the word Google within the Places profile. Having the word Google or AdWords (among others possibly) within any field in your profile can get it flagged and if you are pushing the envelope too far, it could never come out of pending status. You may be able to get around that pending status entirely if you don't use the word Google in the URL.
I wrote a similar post to this about a year ago before Places was even around and I had done the same thing using Google in the URL and found that it was causing issues. The ony thing I would add to this well written and explained article is that you can set up a 301 redirect for the tracking URL so that you don't have the ugly tracking URL showing in the SERPs. More information on that can be found at https://www.digitalthirdcoast.net/blog/track-traffic-google-maps-google-local-google-analytics as a way to get the same tracking in place, but with a cleaner look.
Ooh, I didn't know that about the use of "Google" in a tag. Interesting indeed... the only reason I'm wary of a redirected tracking URL is that I'm not sure what the effect would be of pointing Google directly at a 301'd URL since the launch of Google Place Search with its new blended algo. I'm guessing that it gives the Places URL more weight as a result. Google so far isn't updating/overriding submitted URLs that have been 301'd so far, at least not that I've heard, but I can't imagine that it would be a positive. If someone has more input on that or data or experience with it, I'd love to hear it.
Well with the new blended results, it's not always the homepage or the URL entered into Google Places anyways as now the algorithm will point visitors to the most appropriate page on the site based on more of the standard organic algorithm. So at that point, the data is still skewed using that method because there aren't tracking URL's set up for each page on the site.
The 301'd URL is simply for looks though, either way. I'd also recommend having a canonical URL on the destination page so that you don't run into canonicalization issues.
It only pulls the most appropriate page when it's pulling from the organic portion of the algo. If it pulls from the Places portion, as it does in the graphic where you can see the tracking URL, it goes with whatever is in Places. It doesn't override it or rewrite it. So if you've got a redirected tracking URL in there, that's still going to be what it shows. Google knows it's a redirected URL and can't simply reindex it at the new one like it does with the organic index. So how does it treat it then? Consider that Google has a strong preference for data that can be corrobrated by a number of sources. It might be downgraded for the fact that it doesn't match the majority of information it has. That's why I worry about it.
Nice post Rebecca! I think both you and Tacimala are correct. The thing is even it the appears in a blended result but a page besides the homepage is used, you will not get the tracking you are after. Unless I am misunderstanding your solution and what you are trying to do of course.
Cheers
Mike
None of the solutions are perfect. It seems like I capture the most data with the combo, though it still leaves the ugly URL. I think the redirect method was great a year ago, but that was when Places and organic algos were separate. Now we're in a spot where Places influences organic rank and vice versa, and that makes me question if it's still the best solution. Maybe someone can run that by a Googler and get an answer sometime. Even if it is, though, figuring out a few alternatives was a fun project, and I learned a lot about GA and Google Places in the process :-)
I do acknowledge that my approach to this is very, very conservative. I don't currently have a way to test it without putting my clients' positioning at risk.
This post was a very interesting read! However, it seems that if you have a website that relies heavily on local search and is therefore relevant to the tracking you are proposing, the tracking is still pretty ineffective. Fo several of the companies that I manage, their websites are commonly blended into the Organic portion of the Algo making their clicks from places impossible to track. Still something left to figure out I guess.
That's where you would use the filter instead of the manual tagging. My goal in setting this up was to track traffic directly from the Places profile, which has a URL structure different from the page of organic results. So if you track the full referrer and segment for referrals from only those using the Places URL structure, then it shouldn't be tainted by the organic blending. Even if the Places listing is pulled into organic results, the referrer is still that organic Google URL.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, which is entirely possible given that this can be really intricate.
Just got it. Re-read the post for the 2nd time and the final portion explained everything perfectly. Awesome Post!
This deserves to be pushed to the main blog. Excellent Post!
Holy Toledo Rebecca! What an awesomely geeky (that's a good thing) post! It is making me realize that I really need to delve more into GA beyond the simple segmentation I know.
Not only was this great information, but I really enjoyed your step-by-step approach. Sometimes, we get so caught up in finding the "perfect" method that we don't just test things out and see what works. You did your homework, and it paid off - plus, now you know a lot more about how Places results work behind the scenes.
Thanks, Dr. Pete! I did indeed learn a lot about how GP works with this exercise.
I clearly need to spend more time using Google Analytics. The value of tracking these metrics is tremendous. Thank you!
Holy crap, this is awesome! I was struggeling to identify referal traffic in Google Anayltics from my clients place pages and had to question if it was poor performing maps or if the data was just not segemented from the source traffic. Now I know! I can't wait to implement method #4. I have to wonder though, with Google trying to kick off ads on the place pages and all why they haven't fixed this problem themselves. I mean, if I were Google, I would want my customers to see the added value in the referral traffic, don't you think?
I remember that I saw an article related to this one from Blumenthals » https://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/04/09/tracking-local-search-traffic-with-analytics/
Thanks for this, Rebecca. I have a couple of clients who live and die by their local organic listings, of which Places is becoming a huge part. I am amazed at how much complexity is involved.
I am also amazed at how forthcoming SEOMoz members are with great, helpful information that makes me better at my job!
Google Places will be the death of me.
Great post - we use Google Places as part of our local seo tools (I in fact recently posted a blog post on optimising your google places page: https://www.designbysoap.co.uk/optimising-your-google-places-page/ ) but we've been having trouble recently tracking the traffic from GP. So finding this was extremely useful!
Redirecting a specific landing page is a really good solution, and particularly easy to implement (try the redirections plugin if you're using Wordpress)
Thanks Rebecca, another great SEOMoz post!
I know this is an old post but I'd like to give a heads up that one of these methods may break things at the moment.
If you used method #2 which is adding utm_ campaign tracking parameters or in fact any querystring in your URL then it currently causes the link from the G+ Page to go to a dodgy looking Redirect warning page.
This issue is something new but I'm not sure how long it has been happening.
Luckily it only affects the links from the Business Page itself. In my case most people click directly from the local search results which still works fine. For others the page itself may be their main source of referrals.
I suggest people check their pages links to see if they work as they expect them to.
Great most... i should spend more time to know google analytics... i will try this out as sson as possible...
Great post! Now off to implement this for several clients. Why do I always have more work after reading this blog? ;)
- Evan
Firstly, thanks for a great post.
I was having issues with the manual tagging - I create the URL as per method 2, but when I input it intp my Places listing in place of my existing website address, it causes an issue. Places rejects it saying "This listing does not comply with our policy of allowed terms. The term 'google' is not allowed".
Anyone else experiencing this issue?
I've changed mine to /?utm_source=G&utm_medium=maps&utm_campaign=places
Tacimala pointed out issues with using "Google" in a tag in his comments. I may simply have been lucky when setting up mine. You may have to settle for something like "GPlaces" to get around it.
An additional thought I had this morning about the difficulty of determining office location due to the ugliness of the CID number - a Search and Replace filter should be able to handle this. You would just have to look them up once to build the filter.
I don't think utm tracking will work because Google + uses the same business information as Google Places
Has anyone found a better way to do this? I have a client that has over 150 sub domains each with a Google places listing that we need to track with more than just what is offered in Google places dashboard data. I don't understand why Google has not added a feature like tracking Google places traffic separately with ease. We can't afford to change the URL's for all of the places listings as that could possibly bring us back in rankings significantly.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Interesting ideas, I hope implementing is as easy as it seems! Do you know of any good tools that can help keep track of rankings for local listings? Thanks
I have tried to use this blog and the outlined steps to set up tracking for our Google Places pages in Analytics. I have run into a couple problems though and was wondering if anyone else was havign the same issues. When I look at just a day of traffic in Analytics using the filters for just Google Places traffic, it doesn't reconcile at all with the data on visits and clickthroughs to our website that you can see when you log into your Google Places account. We have 10 different locations that all have seperate Google Places pages, but are all still grouped into the same domain in our Analytics account which would make it very useful to track the GP traffic in our analytics rather than look at each individual pages' stats through the GP account. Has anyone else compared their results in Analytics to the data that GP provides to see if it matches?
Also, using these filters that pick up Maps|Places added a few additional referring sites that shouldn't have been included. We received traffic from www.mapquest.com/maps/.......... which was included in the filter because of the presence of "maps" in the url. I added a 3rd field to the filter that was "user defined value contains google" which eliminated these and kept all the original GP traffic still.
If anyone has any advice or thoughts on my issues with getting the numbers to reconcile and match up I'd appreciate it. As of right now, they are no where close to each other (GP says 42 total visits and Analytics shows 8 total for yesterday).
Thanks
I know that I am a bit late to the party here but I was digging into Local tracking in more detail today to spec out a process for my agency and I thought of a good question for you. I've heard of people losing ALL of their Local rankings after tagging their URLs for GA the way you suggest. Jim at LuanMetrics talks about it here, https://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/04/29/tracking-google-product-search-2/.
I've heard this before and heard that the way to go when adding tracking URLs to links is to reconfigure your GA tracking code to use the "#" instead of the "?". https://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/02/02/hashing-it-out-referral-tracking/. And he even goes a step further by suggesting setting up vanity URLs and redirecting to the tagged URL that is using the #.
Any thoughts on this idea and the idea that you will lose all of your rankings if you use GA tagging on your URLs.
I haven't personally seen this happen, but to be perfectly honest we haven't deployed any of these strategies very widely. The test client didn't see any change in SERP rankings that I would consider significant. It's an interesting note, though, and one to watch closely for certain.
Great post - we use Google Places as part of our local seo tools.
https://www.drnancyhalsema.com/
Genuinely really useful! I'll give it a go!
Great post, very useful considering it doesn't seem likely Google will split up the Places and Organic results as traffic sources in Analytics due to the recent algo change. Thanks!
Great post. Very interesting.
We've been tracking places posts like this but hadn't taken it that step further with the custom segments! I'm sure this will be very useful.
WOW! That was quite the post! Thank you. I might have use for this in the future :)
Excellent post.
Do the analytics filters apply instantly, or are the only for new results after you have made the filter? I couldn't get the info to show up on the "user defined value", it just says (not set).
The filter can't do anything retroactively, unfortunately. It will only collect the referral data from the moment it is set up.
Thank you, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong.
As a note here, Advanced Segments are retroactive in Google Analytics, so if you find certain pieces of data that you are looking to segment (probably not Places related), then you can use that set of tools in GA to look at historical data.
WOW - I want more of this stuff! But wait until I get this one figured out and implemented.
One of the most useful things posted on here in a while for those of us who deal a lot with local.
Thanks!
Great post! This has been on my wishlist for a while and I can't wait to try out some of these methods.
Nice Post.. Because we got more traffic from google local listing and target geo location. Its very helpful to track local listing and importance of keywords.
Wow - absolutely great post. I just took the time and digg into that theme and I really like it!! Everything is setted up - now I have to wait for the results.
Filtering organic traffic from places traffic, relative to the office address is very helpful for me, thanks. I'm assuming similar methods can be applied for products pages on Google Shopping, to distinguish between Google Shopping traffic and organic Google traffic? If there is a post about this anywhere, please let me know where, thanks.
The full referrer filter should allow you to suss out anything on Google with a unique URL structure. All you would need to do is figure out what that structure is and segment it.
@promart You can tag your Shopping feed, then use the Campaign Source to track this information in analytics, as well. We track anything in Google Shopping with the Campaign Source "googlebase," so then it's easy enough to create filters or segments to look just at googlebase.
Google URL builder tool is really great to track campaign like Yahoo PPC, Bing PPC & tracking tag differ than Google. Use Google URL builder tool over Google place is really great one.
WOW.... very good post.. I will try it...
Nice insightful article.. I was just thinking on how can I track traffice coming from google locall biz place pages... I like your recommendation.. will try on this for our site...
Thank you for sharing this great tips.
Regards
Xcellence-IT
Its something i found very helpful and new about google analytics and thanx for sharing this through an intuitive article like this. I think i can benefit from it for analysing more about my kerala travel blog's traffic by google places.