8 replies to this topic

[TigerSEO]

Google Places Tags are presently available in only the test markets of Atlanta, Austin and Washington. We have Tags working for Atlanta clients and the results have been very good. For Google's fee of $25 per month it has proven (so far) to be a solid investment. The enhanced visibility is unquestionable. As more competing advertisers utilize this, and the visibility is diluted, the effectiveness may diminish but our thoughts are that NOT having it would be an error.

If you are unfamiliar with a Google Places Tag you can "Google" house painter atlanta ga and see an example. The Tag can be set to link to a client's website or directions info.

[SEOigloo]

Hello, TigerSEO,
Thanks for sharing your experience thus far with Google's paid Local ads. This is very interesting to read about. May I ask a couple of questions:

1. I did your recommended search an am assuming that is your client, 'New Leaf' coming up in the A position for this search. Was your client ranking in the A position prior to opting into the program?

2. You mention you are seeing results. Are you tracking these in some way that is leading you to that conclusion or is it more just a sense of hearing from clients that they are getting more calls, walk-ins, form submissions etc. since they started advertising?

Would love to hear more and thank you for starting this thread.

[earlpearl]

Interesting. The tag goes to the website, as does the top link. In the case of your client its duplicative, but it in the case of the visitor its an eyecatcher.

I'd be interested in seeing your responses to Miriam's questions.

[TigerSEO]

Before the tag, the client's site was typically #3-4 on the seven pack. As for the effectiveness we have tracked conversions fairly closely and often had the user (their customer) verify that they utilized the Google Places listing. For $300 per year this is a no-brainer for our client - a solid investment!

Note that the Tags are now available in even more cities!

Atlanta
Austin
Boulder
Chicago
Houston
Mountan View
San Diego
San Francisco
San Jose
Seattle
Washington D.C.

[SEOigloo]

Hi TigerSeo,
Thanks so much for responding to this thread, and it sounds like this is, indeed, proving a solid investment for clients lucky enough to be in one of the active cities.

[earlpearl]

Put up my first tags for some businesses. Will report back as I see some results. Google Places dashboard reports activity about 2-3 days after the fact so it will take a while to see some results.

Of my accts; basic google dashboard stats suggest that maps info is hit somewhere between 2-8% of the volume of impressions. I basically think the specifity of the G Places dashboard is very weak and could be misleading. At times though it shows some interesting trends. In general I view the dashboard as far inferior to analytics.

Regardless it will be interesting to see activity.

[Jonashastings]

hope google will lower its price now.
this is interesting but for new business cost is really a matter.

thanks for the information.

[earlpearl]

I have some updates on this, though the biggest update is that the Google Dashboard seems to be malfunctioning somewhat. Never really liked the dashboard versus analytics..but recently it seems to be running on empty

I put up my first tag on 7/6/10. The dashboard hasn't updated data since 7/12/10. Its delayed by a week. Anyone else seeing this? I have 6 accts under 6 different G emails and the dashboard hasn't updated since July 12 on any of them. Second problem w/ the dashboard is that several of the accts simply lost large chunks of daily data in July. (different number of days in each case).

So much for the Google Places Dashboard.

(update--local seo's from Europe and Canada reported the same phenomena today w/ the dashboard having not updated since 7/12)

During the 6 days of reporting the dashboard identified 26 clicks to G tags. That is out of about 1200+ (so called) impressions and 86 clicks to G Maps (I asume they all came from universal search Maps inserted into organic searches).

For this business percentage of clicks to the universal maps is about 7% during the time period. Typically the dashboard shows about 4-6% of clicks for that account. Possibly the dashboard increased clicks to the universal map insert. (I suspect my colleagues and I hit this baby a couple of times on the first day ) )

Looking at this closely though, brings me back to basic unhappiness with the precision and overall helpfulness of the dashboard.

Simply the generalness of the dashboard versus the precision of a combination of analytics and adwords makes it less helpful. One thing I have in analytics/adwords is an ability to track precise keywords within the targeted advertising region and see how the account is doing in capturing a percentage of the searches.

Can't do that with the dashboard. I don't know what the radius is for calculating searches that generate G Maps (places) impressions. There are other deficiencies as well.

In any case I can't speak much to the effectiveness of the tag at this point. Anyone else have experiences with this?

Edited by earlpearl, 19 July 2010 - 10:37 AM.

[earlpearl]

Update as of today the google places dashboard seems to be updating and it seems to be replacing lost data:

As to tags...well as of 7/13 the tag got one visit. ha....not a killer

Any other experiences?