Google Places Analytics - Worth Watching

All marketing should be tracked.  Even free marketing.  Google Places is close to free.  It takes an hour or two to do a decent job of creating the listing, and they now hope to charge you $25 a month to do a bit of advertising, but either way that's about the least your going to pay for any kind of marketing.  In this case, the almost free marketing could potentially make you a bunch of money.  So check once per week to see how you're doing on Places.

The basic information will look something like this.  You will see how many folks saw your listing and how many took action.  Scroll down and you can see what kind of action (eg. directions, clicked to website, etc.)

You can also see what kind of keywords they found you on, and what part of the city they were in when they asked for directions.   Some pretty cool stuff.  The trend line on the above sample was a bit unnerving, as the number of impressions and actions dropped precipitously.  After extensive investigation on forums and emails to other pro's, nobody can explain it.  All of the losses came from lookups of the company's actual name, not from keywords, but a search of the company name in various spellings showed that it was a stand alone listing on the outside map in every case.  Google Places has Glitches.  And nobody's at home to help with the fixes.