Does Google Places Drive Website Traffic?

On Mike Blumenthals blog he recently posted a local SEO survey conducted by Brightlocal.com in which they reported that 59% of consumers use Google each month to find a local businesses. Although I don't doubt that, I found this a little harder to swallow... "Local SEOs reported that Google Places was the number one source of traffic and Google organic was number two". This part of the survey really interigued me, but I wasn't convinced that statement was accurate. Especially interviewing SEOs that could be just throwing out numbers without real data to back it. I know us SEOs and web designers aren't in the same category as politicians, but some I feel are pretty close. :)

Since our April showers today turned into a blowing, wet snowstorm, I decided to stay indoors and do some data digging rather than going outside and doing some honey-do projects. At least I can tell her I am working, right?

I decided to look at the actual log stats and examine the referring URLS that all originated from Google. To keep this simple and fast I used 2 different retail websites in different cities in the USA. One has just one store location while the other website has 2 store locations. Both have claimed their Google Places listings and updated the information. Also, neither website has ever used Google Tags or Google Boost/Adwords. I then looked at the stats for the past 30 days and removed any referrers that were not from Google. This left me with just referring links that came from Google, but not always Google in the USA.

Store #1

Store #1 - clikc for full view

Store #2

Store #2 - Click for full view

The first thing that caught my attention was that so few clicks to the client's website actually came for their Google Place's page. It appears the majority of Google Local clicks to the business's website is actually coming from Google organic search results which includes Google Places listings (ie: 7-Pack). What makes me think this is true is the number of clicks to website Google Places's dashboard stats reports versus how many referring URLS include http://maps.google.com/maps/place.
Note: I haven't conducted a big enough sampling to determine if this is true, but from the above it seems to have some real merit.

Also, others things to notice... the purple colored referring URLS I discarded based on the search location doesn't seem to be relevant to the client's location, or the search doesn't appear to be location in nature. As example, some Google searches were from other countries and others are from Google image searches. So in both cases about 10% of the Google searches I felt were not relevant to the stores.

In both store cases there were aproximately 82% of the searches from google.com/search or google.com/url. I refer to those as Google blended search results based on comments made by Mike Blumenthal on this blog.  Without further examination I have assuming Google blended is coming from Google's search engine listings that include both Google organic and Google Places' listings. Further evidence that makes me think this is,  for each business Google Places stated 30-50+ users clicked and went to the business's website in the past 30 days, but the referring URLs  don't show from http://maps.google.com/maps/place, except for 1 user. So where did the rest of the users come from? That leads me to assume all but one came from the Google's search engine normal listing pages.

Also, this is Google's Mobile search window - http://www.google.com/m Any referrers with that URL were from someone doing a mobile search. This is interesting too.. http://www.google.com/m/local?site=local