Comments on: Tracking Local search Traffic with Analytics

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:17:15 +0000

at the end of the day, you will see very little traffic coming from Places.

By: Joy Hawkins

Joy Hawkins — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:11:41 +0000

haha. You’re both really helpful The company I work for isn’t the ones using the tracking URLS (some other marketing company is) so I was curious to see how this would affect our clients. I’ll be sure to let you guys know if I see the same thing (their rankings plummeting in a month).

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:09:30 +0000

Jim Expressed it better than I but I was “trying” to say what he said… ie I agree with him completely.

By: Joy Hawkins

Joy Hawkins — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:07:40 +0000

@Jim. Perfect!! That is so helpful. Thank you so much for sharing.

By: Jim Gianoglio

Jim Gianoglio — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:48:26 +0000

Hi Joy -

See my comment above (comment #7) about this specific issue.

Granted, it’s been more than two years since I originally did what you were asking about (adding the utm parameters directly to the URL) but the experience I had was that it worked fine for about a month, then rankings dropped like a hot potato.

A better method (one that I still have implemented to this day and continues to work) is setting your URL to something like http://www.example.com/maps and then having that 301 redirect to the URL with the utm parameters.

Hope that helps!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:44:27 +0000

The Places rank is related to domain strength more so than page rank so it should have no impact on ranking. However, sually Google “dings” url’s that include the word google in them so you might need to use a vanity redirect.

By: Joy Hawkins

Joy Hawkins — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:37:43 +0000

Mike,

Sorry, no, this isn’t related to that issue. I was just wondering if using a tracking URL like this listing does would hurt ranking in any way. Instead of using http://www.vernonhinson.com on his Places listing, he’s using http://www.vernonhinson.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=maplistings&utm_campaign=localmaps

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:05:56 +0000

@Joy I presume you are talking about the "We currently do not support" problem? A tracking URL would not be the best way to track that as it is to reactive. You might be further ahead using something like Page2RSS and delivering the feed from that someplace you look at once a day, once a week.... You did read the recent reports on how to fix?

By: Joy

Joy — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:30:11 +0000

Hey Mike,

You might have already answered this question in the comments above, but is there any reason why a business would NOT want to use a tracking URL in their Places page? Example:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?&cid=6434832452931820303

If you click on the website, you’ll see what I mean.

By: Ian Williams

Ian Williams — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:09:45 +0000

@ Jeffrey,

There’s this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics

I am looking to get this set up with my company, but haven’t yet tested it myself.