Editor's note: Since the publication of this post, Google has rebranded the product formerly named "Google Places" and "Google+Local" as "Google My Business". Carry on!

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As I’m sure most of you know, Google’s switchover from http to https for search queries has led to a rapid increase in (not provided) traffic coming into your analytics package. As digital marketers, this web intelligence data is highly relevant for not only driving project plans but for reporting back to clients or internal stakeholders that the tactics and strategies deployed are producing results other than at the very top of the conversion funnel (i.e. rankings.)

For those of us who work in the local search space, especially with small businesses, rankings are generally the first thing a client is interested in, while direct return on their spend is second. While there are lots of good resources out there for coping with (not provided), I have yet to see someone discuss a unique data set that is available to local businesses: the keyword data in Google Places/Plus Local. This unique source of information can help drive the strategy for a campaign, as well as reporting to clients and stakeholders. While this data source has been questioned in the past, that was due to the limited amount of data that you are provided through Google Places Insights and was before the (not provided) apocalypse. Specifically, results past the top 10 for search queries and driving directions are bucketed in to a single entry like 111 "other regions" and 548 "other queries." Despite this limitation, I still think there is lots of valuable information in Google Places Insights that can be put to good use, especially in the ongoing battle with Google over data.

Where Can I Find this Data?

Google Insights data is available in Google Places and Google + Local, although it looks different depending on which local interface you use. In the new Google Places dashboard, you can find this data in the Insights tab.

As you can see the tab displays impression level data, which indicates how many times the Google Places listing showed up in an organic search result in a local pack on both desktop and mobile, as well as both desktop and mobile Google Maps searches.

Where I think the real treasure trove of data exists is in the other tabs, specifically Actions/Directions and Top search queries.

Why Is this Data Important?

I think this data has become increasingly important for three core reasons. While these reasons are a lot to get into for one article, I will list them for you:

1. Google is constantly taking away data from digital marketers;
2. Aggregation of data across numerous data points is critical to make data driven decisions;
3. Google Places/Plus Local provides a free source of information for local businesses that is similar to Google Webmaster Tools.

To illustrate why I think this data can be a valuable cornerstone of a local search strategy I want to focus on the Directions and Top search queries tabs.

First and foremost the amount of information displayed on this tab can rival the information coming in from small businesses own website. Just look at the most closely related report in Google Analytics.

You can see by looking at the numbers that the amount of local web traffic for this business rivals the amount of people who requested driving directions (129 web visitors vs. 166 requests for driving directions). This means that there are more users, which are deeper in the funnel, that are interacting with the business on Google Places than there are interacting with the business website. While there could be some crossover between the website and places for individual users, I think the key takeaway is that there is significant data to be mined by using Google Places Insights data.

It’s also possible to get keyword information from this Google Insights data.

While this is very valuable to use for keyword research for backfilling to your website and content creation strategy, it’s important to note that this information is impression based. That means that the business was displayed in a SERP, rather than someone viewing your Google Places/Plus Local page. While this does make the information slightly less valuable, it also allows you to measure that impression data against actions (driving direction/click to call) so that you can optimize your content to increase the ratio of actions to impressions.

It’s really important to begin warehousing this data as well. Since it is only available for 90 days, I highly recommend setting a calendar reminder for yourself that repeats every 30 days so you can grab the data for that period of time, put it in a database or spreadsheet, and not have overlapping data sets as a result of grabbing data at different times every time you warehouse it.

What can I do with this data?

Other than the basic tactics I have discussed for incorporating this data into your local search strategies, I think there are three pillars of local search that this data can be incorporated in to:

1) Geo Specific Landing Pages - An important strategy to help you rank in geo-locations where your business doesn’t have a physical location is location specific landing pages. Using Google Places insights data allows you to target geo-locations that are more likely to provide off-line revenue i.e. the locations that have the most requests for driving directions and click to call. Going into depth about what is required for a high quality geo- specific landing page is beyond the scope of this article; however, several great resources already exist such as this article by Andrew Shotland, as well as this infographic by Nifty Marketing.

2) Keyword research – As mentioned previously, Google Insights provides keyword impression data that is helpful for keyword research. I have found that the best use for this data is using it in a citation building strategy. Since Google’s local algorithm uses citation volume and quality for helping determine how your Google Places page ranks, you can incorporate keywords that are driving impressions for your business into categories, descriptions, and other information when building out your directory citations. You can also these keywords in your outreach to sow the seeds with other people, ideally for them to use in unstructured citations and/or link building.

3) Reporting – Besides the tactical and strategic uses of this data in your local search campaigns, I have found it very valuable when it comes to reporting. One of the core problems with reporting in local search is the difficulty showing the offline return on investment for your online campaigns. Lots of small business don’t have the capital to invest in top tier reporting and analytics software, but that doesn't mean they care any less on seeing value come from their online spend. For example, you could use the ratio of impressions to actions that I mentioned earlier and chart it over time to show increased performance for the Google Places listing in driving customers deeper into the conversion funnel.

What about Multi-Location Businesses?

I would argue that this information is also incredibly valuable to multi-location business, when aggregated and parsed, as it allows for sorting data by region, or other geo-specific manner in order to fine tune a local search strategy. While the ability to use the information is more or less the same for multi-location companies, data-gathering and aggregation is a much bigger challenge. It requires a significant amount of labor hours just to collect and store the data, and the data analysis becomes more complex when dealing with large amounts of data that can be broken down is various geo-specific ways. Unfortunately, you cannot access any of this data via the Google Places API, and with the way Google treats their local products I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to change. Collecting and warehousing this data is a perfect task for your AAs and VAs (administrative and virtual assistants) or interns, and hopefully you already have an analyst on the payroll to help make it actionable.

Are any of you using Google Places Insights data in your local search campaigns? What are some of your favorite uses for this data, and how are you comparing it to other data sources to drive richer insights? I would love to hear from you in the comments (or ping me!).