Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Web Analytics TV #10 with Avinash and Nick

Posted: 30 Jun 2010 04:47 AM PDT

Google Analytics Blog: Web Analytics TV #10 with Avinash and Nick

It's the 10th Anniversary of Web Analytics TV! Happy Birthday to us!

In this exciting series, with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via our Google Moderator site for Web Analytics TV and we answer them.

Here is the list of last week's questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:

  • Tracking un-subscriptions with negative values
  • Best practices tracking social media
  • Sources of keywords outside of Paid Search to help site optimization
  • Custom reports sorted by date
  • Tracking form validation with Google Analytics
  • Why Exit Rate is 0% in the Google Analytics navigation summary report
  • Tips to avoid sampling on landing pages
  • Configuring Google Analytics to track test and production environments
  • Comparing Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
  • Best practices for tracking PDF downloads
  • Getting the full referring URL in Google Analytics
  • Sharing custom reports with advanced segments
  • Best way to find keywords from mobile traffic
  • Tracking dimensions over time in Google Analytics
  • Tracking the impact of interactive TV



Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

If you found this post helpful, we'd love to hear your comments, please share them via the comment form below.

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Thanks!

Posted By Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/06/web-analytics-tv-10-with-avinash-and.html

[G] AdWords ad serving issue

Posted: 30 Jun 2010 12:56 AM PDT

Inside AdWords: AdWords ad serving issue

At approximately 1:40pm Pacific Time today, we encountered an issue that prevented ads from being shown on Google.com and Search Partner sites.  Our engineering team has diagnosed the issue and is working hard to restore service. As of now, most of the service has been restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and will update you with more details as soon as we've fully resolved the issue.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

UPDATE 4:41pm PDT: We have fully resolved this issue. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our engineers are working to ensure that this type of issue doesn't occur again.
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/adwords-ad-serving-issue.html

[G] Brown University has gone Google

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 05:22 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Brown University has gone Google

From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Geoff Greene join us here. Geoff is the Director of IT Support Services at Brown University, and here he shares an update on their campus-wide migration to Google Apps for Education for all students, staff and faculty. - Ed.

About a year ago we put our 6,000 undergraduate students on Google Apps. The results were phenomenal: people were happy, they were productive, they were excited...and then some people got jealous. Our faculty and staff members started coming to us asking "When do we get to go Google?" Turns out they also wanted access to the same tools to better connect and engage with students and with each other.

We thought about it for a bit and realized that they had a point. So we decided to bring the entire Brown University community together—faculty, staff, medical and grad students—with a common set of tools: Google Apps for Education. This summer, our Computing & Information Services team is in the process of migrating everyone to our new GoogleApps@Brown system. The positive experience our undergrads have had using the Apps suite helped our Provost David Kertzer decide that the change would bring significant benefits and cost savings to the university as a whole. In fact, we predict this change could save us somewhere around $1 million each year.

Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path. They knew these tools would work because they already used them in their non-school lives. We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.

The icing on the cake is that we signed a zero dollar contract for all these top-notch tools. But it's not just about saving money—it's also about investing in our university's future. Google Apps helps us work better together, and we can feel the excitement building on campus as a result. Here's a little glimpse:


Since some faculty and staff members aren't as familiar with the new tools just yet, we also hosted a "roadshow" to spread the word and gear up training sessions tailored for each campus group or department. Our training efforts are robust (you can check it out at training.brown.edu) and we have Google Guides—enthusiastic staff and student volunteers—helping their peers with the transition. We feel confident that once people start using these tools together, they'll never look back.

Posted by Geoff Greene, Brown University Computing & Information Services
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/brown-university-has-gone-google.html

[G] New Search Operators in your Documents List

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 04:17 PM PDT

Official Google Docs Blog: New Search Operators in your Documents List

Have you ever tried looking for a document or spreadsheet from a particular time or from a certain person about a specific topic? Let's say you're a rocket scientist and you're looking for the presentation about "Prototype rockets with lasers" that your manager sent you last year.

Normally, you'd just search for [rockets lasers prototypes]. But, lets face it, you're a rocket scientist so you get lots of matching results; just about every document you have is about rockets or lasers.

You could narrow the search in the advanced search menu or you can use Search Operators and refine the search directly in the search box:
  • Quotes for exact phrase matching. Example: [ "match this phrase exactly" ]
  • OR to allow either one of several words. Example: [ "rockets" OR "shuttles" ]
  • Items without a certain word: [ rocket -man ] will return docs that mention rocket, but not rocket man.
  • Items you shared with, or had shared with you: [ from:ted@rocketsnlasers.com ] or [ to:ted@rocketsnlasers.com ]
  • Starred or Hidden items: [ is:starred ] or [ is:hidden ]
And we recently added a some new search operators:
  • Type of doc: [ type:{document, spreadsheet, presentation} ]
  • Items edited before (or after) a certain day: [ before:YYYY-MM-DD, after:YYYY-MM-DD ]
  • Items owned by Ted: [ owner:ted@rocketsnlasers.com ]
  • Items with "rocket" in the title: [ title:rocket ]; [ subject:rocket ] does the same thing
Now you, the rocket scientist, should be able to easily find your boss' presentation by searching for [ rocket laser prototypes from:overhead@rocketsnlasers.com before:2010-01-01 type:presentation ].

Posted by: Vivek Haldar, Software Engineer
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-search-operators-in-your-documents.html

[G] New Advertiser Goals in the Opportunities Tab

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 02:59 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: New Advertiser Goals in the Opportunities Tab

When you optimize your AdWords account, you probably start with a primary goal in mind. Some advertisers focus on increasing traffic, while others care more about keeping costs down or monitoring return on investment.

The keyword, bid, and budget ideas you currently see in the Opportunities tab aim to provide you with a balance between increasing traffic and managing costs. Starting today, however, and rolling out globally over the next few weeks, you'll be able to choose from three common advertiser goals to match your overall optimization objectives. The three new options are as follows:
  • Maintain or Decrease Cost - Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.
  • Increase Traffic - Identify ideas that can help you get more traffic at varying cost levels.
  • Balance Cost and Traffic - Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.

After you choose a goal for your account, the ideas you see in the Opportunities tab will be customized to match your selection. The Opportunities tab remembers your choice of goal unless you change it, which you can do at any time.

We hope this will help provide you with even better ideas to optimize your account and we look forward to offering even more advertising goals in the future.

To learn more about the Opportunities tab, visit the AdWords Help Center or view our video playlist on YouTube.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-advertiser-goals-in-opportunities.html

[G] Find more in Google Social Search

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 02:34 PM PDT

Social Web Blog: Find more in Google Social Search

In January we introduced Google Social Search to help you discover relevant web content published by your friends and broader network of contacts. Since that time we've worked to steadily improve our comprehensiveness using public URLs and data on the web. Today we're expanding Social Search using additional links that appear in the Buzz tab of your Google profile.

If you're signed-in, Google makes a best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your search results -- the content you see comes from your "social circle." Your social circle includes a variety of private and public connections, such as the ones surfaced through links that appear on your Google profile. To improve social search, we've started following a more comprehensive set of the public links from your Google profile to populate your "social circle" and to find social content.

Here's how it works: If you use Buzz, you have the option to add "Connected Sites" and post content from these sites publicly on your Google profile. For example, you can choose to connect your Twitter account and set your tweets to appear publicly in your Buzz stream and the Buzz tab of your profile.


With our enhancements today, we'll start following these public links in the Buzz tab to improve your social search results. That means if there's a link to your Twitter account in your public Buzz stream, we'll follow that link to add the people you follow on Twitter to your social circle. If you don't use Buzz, you can still add links to YouTube, Picasa and other sites directly to your Google profile, and we'll continue to follow those links as well.

As before, all the content that appears in Social Search is public, and only you can see your private connections. You can see exactly what content you're sharing and who you're connected with by clicking "My Social Content" and "My Social Circle" next to any social search result. To learn more about Google Social Search, please see our help center.

For our avid Buzz users out there, we hope this improves your social search results on Google. In the future, we'll continue to improve social search using links that appear in Google profiles. The changes are rolling out now and should be fully deployed by the end of the week. As always, you can click "more search tools" and select "social" to see more results from your network. Try it out, and give us feedback.

Posted by Mike Lopyrev, Software Engineer
URL: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/06/find-more-in-google-social-search.html

[G] An update on China

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 02:33 PM PDT

Google Public Policy Blog: An update on China

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Ever since we launched Google.cn, our search engine for mainland Chinese users, we have done our best to increase access to information while abiding by Chinese law. This has not always been an easy balance to strike, especially since our January announcement that we were no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn.

We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it's clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it's up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can't operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.

That's a prospect dreaded by many of our Chinese users, who have been vocal about their desire to keep Google.cn alive. We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

Over the next few days we'll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.

As a company we aspire to make information available to users everywhere, including China. It's why we have worked so hard to keep Google.cn alive, as well as to continue our research and development work in China. This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law. We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html

[G] 3D Viewing Option Available Again on Google Books

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:28 PM PDT

Inside Google Books: 3D Viewing Option Available Again on Google Books

Posted by Diego Puppin, Engineer, and Brandon Badger, Product Manager

On April 1st we launched a 3D viewing mode on Google Books. We took the feature down on April 2nd in order to focus our efforts on a 4D version. That effort failed miserably, but I'm happy to announce that we've gone back and enabled the 3D version of Google Books for your viewing pleasure via a special URL parameter. To see any book in 3D, just add &edge=3d to the book's URL (Note: be sure to add this parameter before the # in the URL).


Here's an example:






URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/06/3d-viewing-option-available-again-on.html

[G] Video game fans pick their E3 fave

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:11 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Video game fans pick their E3 fave

YouTube's video gamers have spoken. First, they were treated to four days of live streaming from the gaming industry's annual trade show, E3. The coverage elicited over 30,000 comments on the channel, as enthusiasts gave shout-outs to their favorite games, characters and platforms. They were also able to vote on their favorite E3 game trailer, which turned out to be this:





Congratulations to "Disney/Pixar Toy Story 3: The Video Game"! To see the other trailers in the top three, check out the E3 channel, and don't forget to subscribe so you'll get notified when we launch our 2011 coverage -- because it's never too soon to be thinking about where the gaming industry will take thumb-numbing action next.



Mark Day, Gaming Manager, recently watched "Amazing Fire Animation!"

 


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/7fy4VKPakd4/video-game-fans-pick-their-e3-fave.html

[G] Brown University has gone Google

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 10:47 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Brown University has gone Google

(Cross-posted with the Google Enterprise Blog)

From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Geoff Greene join us here. Geoff is the Director of IT Support Services at Brown University, and here he shares an update on their campus-wide migration to Google Apps for Education for all students, staff and faculty. - Ed.

About a year ago we put our 6,000 undergraduate students on Google Apps. The results were phenomenal: people were happy, they were productive, they were excited...and then some people got jealous. Our faculty and staff members started coming to us asking "When do we get to go Google?" Turns out they also wanted access to the same tools to better connect and engage with students and with each other.

We thought about it for a bit and realized that they had a point. So we decided to bring the entire Brown University community together—faculty, staff, medical and grad students—with a common set of tools: Google Apps for Education. This summer, our Computing & Information Services team is in the process of migrating everyone to our new GoogleApps@Brown system. The positive experience our undergrads have had using the Apps suite helped our Provost David Kertzer decide that the change would bring significant benefits and cost savings to the university as a whole. In fact, we predict this change could save us somewhere around $1 million each year.

Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path. They knew these tools would work because they already used them in their non-school lives. We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.

The icing on the cake is that we signed a zero dollar contract for all these top-notch tools. But it's not just about saving money—it's also about investing in our university's future. Google Apps helps us work better together, and we can feel the excitement building on campus as a result. Here's a little glimpse:



Since some faculty and staff members aren't as familiar with the new tools just yet, we also hosted a "roadshow" to spread the word and gear up training sessions tailored for each campus group or department. Our training efforts are robust (you can check it out at training.brown.edu) and we have Google Guides—enthusiastic staff and student volunteers—helping their peers with the transition. We feel confident that once people start using these tools together, they'll never look back.

Posted by Geoff Greene, Brown University Computing & Information Services
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/brown-university-has-gone-google.html

[G] Rumblefish Launches User Friendly Music Program for YouTube Community

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 08:14 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Rumblefish Launches User Friendly Music Program for YouTube Community

Do you ever wonder how to find music you're allowed to use in your videos? Have you had a video blocked due to unauthorized use of music? Well, we are happy to show our support for a new site called FriendlyMusic. FriendlyMusic gives YouTube users the option of purchasing a lifetime license to edit a song into their video. How does this work? Go to www.friendlymusic.com and browse through their catalog of pre-cleared music for YouTube. You then have the option to purchase an mp3 and download the track. Once you download it, the track is yours and subject to your creativity. Add it to a YouTube video, create a mash-up with, or add it onto the existing audio in your YouTube video. Videos with Friendly Music soundtracks are licensed for unlimited views for the life of the video all over the world.

Since its launch, YouTube has pioneered ways for users to get professional music into their videos while respecting copyright -- and generating revenue and promotion for artists, songwriters, and music companies. Through Content ID and a series of unprecedented deals with music labels and publishers, we've turned user-made music videos into a business opportunity as well as a form of expression. With Audioswap, we built a library of songs you can drop right into your existing YouTube uploads. And with countless artists, we've hosted DIY music-video contests and film festivals.

To be clear, many of the FriendlyMusic tracks are still available for free in Audioswap. What's new is that the FriendlyMusic store offers you up-front reassurance that specific songs are pre-cleared for your video -- plus the ability to edit those songs in your own video editing tools, at the point of creation. This marks the first time a music company has offered YouTube users a direct license. We're excited about it and we hope you are too.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

- Ali Sandler, Music Partner Manager and Glenn Brown, Head of Music Partnerships, YouTube, recently both watched "Baby Samba Dance!"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/MPuUy6ma3dU/rumblefish-launches-user-friendly-music.html

[G] Google Apps Marketplace highlights, 6/29/2010

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 07:40 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Apps Marketplace highlights, 6/29/2010

Editor's note: This is the latest in a series of posts on new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace – things that have caught our eye here at Google. We'll do this every few weeks or as we see things that we'd like to share. Look for the label "marketplace highlights" and subscribe to the series if you'd like to stay tuned.

Businesses that use Google Apps not only get access to Google's applications, they also get easy access to some of the best business apps on the web through the Google Apps Marketplace. These Marketplace apps are easy to try and buy, and integrate with Google Apps "out of the box," making it even easier for businesses to run more of their systems in the cloud.

You can learn more about the Marketplace and watch a short video on how it works here.

Get Satisfaction – Customer communities
Get Satisfaction is a social platform that helps businesses and organizations create customer communities that facilitate conversations, reduce support costs, and gather real-time market feedback.
  • Build better customer relationships
  • Reduce support costs
  • Collect valuable market data
Jobscore – Recruiting and applicant tracking
JobScore is a "hiring headquarters" where your entire team can securely see and search your jobs, resumes & feedback.
  • Free applicant tracking system and careers site
  • Easily post to multiple job boards with one click
  • Unlimited users = more referrals & better feedback
Concur Breeze – Expense Reports
Concur Breeze is designed specifically to help small businesses take the hassle out of expense reporting, enabling employees to spend more time making on productive work.
  • Expense reports created from credit card charges
  • Built-in best practice setup
  • 30-day free trial
gTrax – Timesheets
gTrax is an integrated tool for recording and reporting on your employees time usage on a per project basis.
  • Identify and apply resources to projects
  • Explore employees' activities
  • Create time budgets and monitor progress
Surveymonkey - Online Surveys
Quickly and easily gather the insights you need to move your business forward.
  • Powerful yet simple survey creation
  • Fast & flexible response gathering
  • Intelligent reporting & analysis
Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-apps-marketplace-highlights.html
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