As a Google Analytics user, chances are you know the value of good data on traffic to your website. More data means you can make better-informed decisions about how to drive traffic to your site and to your brick-and-mortar locations. But your website is just a part of your entire web presence.

Users of Google Maps and Google Search, for example, may also be interacting with your local listing on Google. While Google Analytics is fantastic for measuring traffic to your site, there has previously been no way to measure how customers interact with other elements of your web presence. That is, until today. The Google Maps team has just launched a new dashboard in its free Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) that will provide you with information on how users interact with your local listing on Google Maps and Google Search.

This new dashboard provides detailed metrics on traffic to local listings on Google Maps -- helping you understand, for example, how many times your listing appears in Google.com or Google Maps local search results, what search queries lead users to your listing, and what zip codes customers come from when they search for directions to your location. This is the first time this kind of data has ever been made available to business owners, and we think you'll find it highly useful.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Official Google Blog for a more-detailed overview or the Lat Long blog for a walk-through of the dashboard's features.

Posted by Laura Melahn, Google Maps Team