Tracking Google Local Click-Thrus (Maps)

[Wizkids964]

We've expanded our business to be in multiple cities.  We are tracking our local rankings in each city and have Adwords campaigns for those cities with location extensions.  We have a separate contact page for each city but haven't setup landing pages for each city which would be fairly tricky as our services are identical for each city.  So really the landing page would be almost identical to our home page content with maybe a photo of the city and the city's name thrown in here and there - definitely a risk of duplicate content detection.

What I'm wondering is if anyone knows if there a Google Analytics report we can run to show us links from our Google Places for Business Listing segregated by location?  My guess is that we would need to make each URL for each Google Places listing unique to that location, like http://www.oursite.com?{name of city}  Or is this not even necessary by using some report settings in Google Analytics?

-- update --

Well this is a 7-year old article but I suspect it might still basically hold true?  In other words, it's not easy and straight forward.  What I'm wondering is, if I use the ?{cityname} URL only in my Places listings URLs, well, let's make it ?place={cityname} then really all I need to do is run a report filtering by URL contains ?place=    Can it really be that simple because if it is, then this old article and others like it seem to be really over complicating the strategy for simply seeing your googe places listing traffic in total and by location?

https://moz.com/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics

Furthermore, if we plan on eventually building home pages for each location, maybe the better URL structure would be mysite.com/places/{city name}  and just do a 301 to the home page until the custom page is built.  The big question then arises if we are only using this URL in our Google Places listings does it have any farther reaching effect on Google's organic view of our website?  In other words will it try to add a unique Google Places URL to the organic results database?  Will it cause a suspension of the Google Places listing?  If we create the URL as an alias to the home page instead of a 301 will it risk dupe content penalty.  Wait a sec... if we use a 301 won't that render tracking in Analytics useless as it's only then going to count the pageview for the home page and not the original URL, right?

I guess we could use an alias and then in the robots.txt dissallow indexing of any URLs with /places/  ?

Now I think I'M over complicating things.  Seems like the best/easiest/safest method is to just a ?place={city name} to the Google Places URL. Then once we have unique places landing pages, just go update the URL in all our places listing.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Wizkids,

Thanks so much for bringing your question to the forum. I'm so sorry - I've read through your post twice and am not totally sure what you are asking.

I agree, the Moz post you found is too old to use reliably. The entire lingo of Local has changed so significantly since 2011, as have many Google features.

Can you simplify your question, please, to ensure that the community is getting to the heart of the matter? What precisely is your goal? What are you trying to track? Organic traffic from Google My Business listings to your website? Something else? If you can refine your scenario, I'm hoping we can find an answer for you. Thank you