New for local business owners: the Google Maps LBC dashboard

If your enterprise maintains one or more physical locations, you may already know that roughly 80% of consumers use search to find local businesses. But unless those customers are also visiting your website directly, you may not know much about how those customers are finding you, or where they're coming from when they visit one of your locations.

That's because your site 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. And while there are plenty of great tools out there (like Google Analytics) to measure traffic to your site, there isn't any way to measure how customers are interacting with other elements of your web presence like your listing.

That is, until today. The Google Maps team has just launched a new dashboard in its free Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) tool that will open up exactly that kind of data to business owners.

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. And be sure press the play button, below, to see things in action.