By James Heffield, PC World, Auckland - Reseller News | Thursday, November 26 2009

Google has released a free dashboard tool in New Zealand designed to help businesses gain more insight into what is driving online traffic to their web listings.

The dashboard, added to the Local Business Centre, allows businesses to view keywords people are typing into Google to find them online, how many times searchers have visited their website and the number of times people searched for their business on Google.co.nz or Google Maps.

Google product manager Andrew Foster said on the company’s New Zealand blog that businesses would be able to use the tool to gain a greater web presence and potentially increase profits.

“Did [people] search for ‘pizza’ or ‘pasta’ to get to the listing for your Italian restaurant? What happens to traffic for your dental practice when you start advertising in the local paper? With information like that, you’d be able to make better, more informed decisions on how to drive more visitors to your listing and attract more customers.”

The information gathered by the dashboard would be updated daily and could be displayed using lists, maps and graphs, Foster said.

Businesses wanting to use the dashboard can download it from Google’s Local Business Centre and claim their listing via a verification process to view the data. New Zealand data has been recorded for the past month and businesses can view it immediately upon claiming their listing.