Google Analytics gets an Enterprise Upgrade
Google has announced several upgrades to their popular Analytics application. On Tuesday, they announced a fresh new look for the program. It’s nothing drastic, but rather a bit of a clean-up job. It also seems to be a bit faster although I’m not sure if this was intentional or a happy side-effect of the redesign (or ‘realign‘ if you will).
On Wednesday – that’s today – they announced several additional functionality improvements including advanced segmentation, “motion charts”, adsense reporting, custom reporting. and an API.
Motion Charts
Google’s new “Motion Charts” tool allows you to observe a particular keyword’s (or group of keywords’) performance over time. You have full control segmentation dimensions that are displayed as x- and y-axis, bubble size, bubble color, and motion over time. This gives the user unprecedented insight into a campaign’s performance and will be very useful to webmasters.
Advanced Segmentation
Segmentation has always been possible within Google Analytics, but you were limited to the slices that were already prepared. With their new Advanced Segmentation tools, you can choose a nearly infinite number of segments, filters, values, etc. And my favorite feature? You can save your segmentations for future use. Over the course of time, that will save hours of work and make it infinitely easier to draw useful insights from the data.
Custom Reporting
Have you ever wanted to see a particular report in Google Analytics but couldn’t figure out how to make Analytics show it to you? Me too. But the new Custom Reporting feature lets you create reports that contain only the metrics you want to see. Just define the metrics you want to analyze along with the dimensions you want to see. (If you want, you can even define sub-dimensions.) And like “Advanced Segmentation”, you can save all your custom reports for future use. See the video below for an example.
AdSense Integration
If you use Google’s AdSense program, today is a great day. Analytics now contains (or will soon contain… it’s rolling out slowly) new reporting just for you. Using the new functionality, you’ll have insight into a wealth of new data such as: AdSense revenue, AdSense revenue per 1000 visitors, # of AdSense ads clicked, # of AdSense ads clicked per visitor, AdSense CTR, and much more. You’ll be able to see which of your content generates the most AdSense revenue, and which of your referrers pushes the most profitable traffic. Combine all that with the new segmentation and reporting features, and you’re well on your way to optimizing your site for profitability.
API
For those of you who don’t know what an API is, it’s a way of extracting data out of a program (in this case, Google Analytics) for use in another program. By offering an API, Google is making it easier for developers to write programs that can extend the functionality of Google Analytics but providing additional services using the data from Analytics. This is great news for you. It means that soon, there will be even more ways to slice & dice your site’s information using data from Analytics.
What do you think of the new functionality (and more importantly, the new look 
)
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Tags: analytics, google, google analytics, redesign, search engine optimization, search marketing, sem, seo, web design, web development, website redesign
Your Home Page Is Ugly
Oct 9, 2008 Uncategorized
Here’s a little food for thought
You make sure to dress up nicely for work every day. If you’re a retail business, you probably make sure there is a dress code that ensures your employees look presentable. Your store is probably cleaner than your bedroom at home, and you pay good money for letterhead and business cards so your company looks professional.
So why oh why do so many businesses scrimp on their websites? Why do you spend heaps of money trying to make your company appear professional, and but you only want to spend $400 on a web site? Don’t you realize that’s where many of your potential customers will get their first impression of you.
Is your home page ugly? If so, clean it up… for the company’s sake.
Tags: business, home page, marketing, web design
Worst Idea Ever… .anything Domain Names
Jul 22, 2008 Uncategorized
I just read that ICANN is considering opening the floodgates to webmasters so they can register any top-level-domain with at least three characters.
Not good.
The only people who will benefit from this are spammers, phishers, domain-squatters, and fraudsters. Imagine getting an email asking you to download document.doc. You’ll assume it’s a Word file. Wrong… it could be a link to a phishing website located at http://www.document.doc.
Do we need more TLDs? Yes. But there should be a thorough vetting process before releasing them into the wild.
Tags: domain name, domain registration, domains, icann, tld, top level domain, web design
Starpointe CMS … Easy Content Management for Small Businesses
Jun 11, 2008 Uncategorized
Announcing “Starpointe CMS“, an easy-to-use content management tool for small businesses.
It’s quick to learn and very simple to use. Anyone is welcome to use it. If you can use a word processor, you can do this (but it’s specifically helpful for managing small business websites).
Don’t worry, you don’t have to move your website to a new host or anything. If you’re interested in learning more, just let me now. I can demonstrate it for you and even install it temporarily onto your site so you can see what you think.
If you’re interested in taking it for a spin, leave a comment below and I’ll waive your setup fee.
Tags: cms, content management, content management system, maintain a website, small business website, starpointe, starpointe cms, starpointecms, web design, website design, website maintenance
Hey NotchUp – Don’t Copy Other Websites!
Jan 28, 2008 Uncategorized
Just a quick thought. If you’re starting a business and want to be thought of as “new and innovative”, don’t copy your website design from someone else. A friend just invited me to try NotchUp, a new career networking site. When I arrived, I instantly though that it looked strikingly similar to the page layout of GrandCentral. After browsing over to GrandCentral to do a comparison, I realized it was way more similar that I had anticipated. In fact, it’s almost a carbon copy. Take a look.
NotchUp’s Website
GrandCentral’s Website
Come on people, I don’t know how many millions you spent in VC funding to come up with the latest “Web 2.0″ “social networking” service. Now just fork over the other $5k and get your own site design.
Tags: grandcentral, notchup, social network, social networking, web 2.0, web design, web2.0
Hey NotchUp – Don’t Copy Other Websites!
Jan 28, 2008 Uncategorized
Just a quick thought. If you’re starting a business and want to be thought of as “new and innovative”, don’t copy your website design from someone else. A friend just invited me to try NotchUp, a new career networking site. When I arrived, I instantly though that it looked strikingly similar to the page layout of GrandCentral. After browsing over to GrandCentral to do a comparison, I realized it was way more similar that I had anticipated. In fact, it’s almost a carbon copy. Take a look.
NotchUp’s Website
GrandCentral’s Website
Come on people, I don’t know how many millions you spent in VC funding to come up with the latest “Web 2.0″ “social networking” service. Now just fork over the other $5k and get your own site design.
Tags: grandcentral, notchup, social network, social networking, web 2.0, web design, web2.0
Adobe.com redesigned
Dec 8, 2007 Uncategorized
Okay I know I just barely posted about major sites that have redesigned but here’s another one to chalk up. Adobe.com. Problem is…they’ve screwed everything up. First, lets take a look at their old site.
Now there was nothing spectacular about this design, but it was clean and open. It offered lots of whitespace and felt balanced. You could get where you wanted to go and all the internal pages matched the homepage in personality.
But take a look at their new page. It’s large and imposing, it feels off balance, and you have to scroll way down to get past the huge video if you want to access the content.
Add to that the the internal pages each have their own style and you get a mishmash of disunity. C’mon Adobe, you’re supposed to be the masters of design. You can do better than that.
Tags: adobe, adobe.com, ugly website, web design, website redesign
Time for a website redesign? GigaOM, Amazon.com, and MSNBC are doing it.
Nov 26, 2007 Uncategorized
Lots of big sites are getting makeovers right now. Is there something in the air? What’s going on?
Off the top of my head, I can think of MSNBC.com, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Freelance Switch, GigaOM and Web Worker Daily that have recently redesigned (or realigned for those in the know). I’ve also heard rumors that Del.icio.us is redesigning.
Who else has redesigned lately? Add other sites in the comments.
Tags: marketing, News, web design
