Googland |
- [G] Convergence Brought Home
- [G] Connecting a Google account to your older YouTube account
- [G] Announcing the release of the upgraded Billing tab
- [G] Introducing our Google Fiber for Communities website
- [G] CPG Product Launches in the New Digital Age
- [G] Picasa Web Albums goes on a Picnik
- [G] It's App Tuesday: 10 new apps available in the Google Apps Marketplace today
- [G] Google Apps adds more admin controls for mobile devices
- [G] Going Google: a webinar with Brown University
- [G] Using The Wrong Tracking Code Can Cost You $500k a Year
- [G] App Tuesday: 10 new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace
- [G] Follow Team HTC-Columbia on Google Maps and Then Let Others Follow You
- [G] FriendFeed Subscriber counts not reported since July 10
| Posted: 14 Jul 2010 02:20 AM PDT Google Public Policy Blog: Convergence Brought HomePosted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media CounselConvergence is an overused and misused term, but fortunately it's back in vogue for all the right reasons at the Federal Communications Commission. Back in December, Google and others suggested that the FCC pave the way for the convergence of the Internet and the television screen in their National Broadband Plan. Such a convergence would increase innovation, enhance consumer experiences, and drive broadband adoption and usage. While the technical ability to access Internet and video content through a television platform has been possible for years, an open and vibrant retail video device marketplace has yet to materialize. In comments we filed today with the FCC, we expressed our support for the so-called "AllVid" solution. This approach would allow consumers to purchase inexpensive universal adapters, featuring common interfaces and standards, that would connect with smart video devices, including TVs. In essence, for the first time consumers would be able seamlessly to bring the full power of the Internet to their in-home TV screen. That's the kind of convergence we think everyone should be able to support.  URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/07/convergence-brought-home.html       |
| [G] Connecting a Google account to your older YouTube account Posted: 13 Jul 2010 02:52 PM PDT YouTube Blog: Connecting a Google account to your older YouTube accountFollowing YouTube's acquisition by Google in 2006, new YouTube signups were given the choice between two different account systems to power their YouTube experience: the original YouTube account system (built in 2005) or the Google account system.In May 2009, we started requiring all new YouTube usernames to be powered by Google accounts. Now, we're gradually asking all remaining pre-May 2009 users still using the older YouTube account system to connect a Google account to their YouTube username. For now, it's an optional step, but eventually it'll be required in order to continue using your YouTube username. Before we go any further, we should clarify three important facts:
So what's the point of asking people to connect a Google account to their older YouTube account? Here are the main reasons:
If you have an older YouTube account and you'd like to link to a new or existing Google account today, just visit this page and choose to link to an existing Google account or a brand new one. You can also visit our "Linked YouTube/Google Accounts" topic in the Help Center for more information on common questions and problems. And, as a reminder, if you'd like to review all of the services and data associated with your Google account at a glance, visit the Google Privacy Dashboard. Brett Hobbs, Software Engineer, recently watched "The World's Reaction to Landon Donovan's Game Winning Goal."     URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/LtIjxSbx-p4/connecting-google-account-to-your-older.html   |
| [G] Announcing the release of the upgraded Billing tab Posted: 13 Jul 2010 01:31 PM PDT Inside AdWords: Announcing the release of the upgraded Billing tabOn June 3rd, we invited you to participate in the launch of our new Billing tab– giving you more control over when and how much you're charged. Today, we're excited to announce the new Billing tab's wider launch. Although some of you already have the new tab in your account, we'll be rolling it out to all advertisers in the coming months. The upgrade doesn't require any action from you -- your billing method and form of payment will stay the same.The new Billing tab comes with a number of benefits and a few terminology changes. For example, you now have the option to switch between automatic and manual payments. For more information on the new Billing tab, please check out the FAQ in the AdWords Help Center. Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew  URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/07/announcing-release-of-upgraded-billing.html   |
| [G] Introducing our Google Fiber for Communities website Posted: 13 Jul 2010 01:15 PM PDT Official Google Blog: Introducing our Google Fiber for Communities websiteIn February we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra-high speed broadband networks. Over the past several months, our team's been hard at work reviewing the nearly 1,100 community responses to our request for information—not to mention the nearly 200,000 responses from individuals across the U.S.Throughout this process, one message has come through loud and clear: people are hungry for better and faster Internet access. With that in mind, today we're launching a new site called Google Fiber for Communities, where you can learn more about fiber networks and keep up-to-date on our project. You'll also be able to advocate for common-sense federal and local policies that would help fiber deployments nationwide. We also wanted to thank every community and individual that submitted a response, posted a YouTube video, started a website, joined a rally or otherwise let their voice be heard. We were so honored by the grassroots enthusiasm across the country for this project that we put together a short video to say thank you: As we explained back in March, we plan to name our target community or communities by the end of the year. We still have some work ahead of us before we're ready to make that announcement, but in the meantime, we hope this site helps to keep the conversation going. Posted by Minnie Ingersoll, Product Manager  URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/introducing-our-google-fiber-for.html   |
| [G] CPG Product Launches in the New Digital Age Posted: 13 Jul 2010 12:00 PM PDT Official Google CPG Blog: CPG Product Launches in the New Digital AgePosted by Jenny Liu, Industry Marketing Manager for CPGAccording to the Mintel Global New Products Database, there were over 14,000 new U.S. product launches in the food and drink category in 2009; this makes for an extremely crowded and competitive marketplace, in which brands have a tough time making sure their new products stand out from the crowd. Further, it's hard to make sure consumers remember a particular product. According to Mintel, 69% of survey respondents could not remember a single new product launched during 2008. We caught up with Mary Pochobradsky, Marketing Director for P&G's Bounce Dryer Bar, and Jodi Benson, Baking R&D and Transformational Business Development Director for General Mills, at the Edison Awards in NYC to hear about the tools in today's marketing arsenal. Mary Pochobradsky talked about the launch of the Bounce Dryer Bar and shared three tactics to build awareness, trial and strong relationships with consumers: - Create advocacy by partnering with bloggers - Foster the sharing of brand experiences among consumers - Answer tough questions from consumers right away Jodi Benson talked about the launch of Betty Crocker's Gluten-Free Baking mixes and shared her perspective on how mass marketers should expand their marketing toolkits to capture the fragmented attention of today's consumers. She also hit on some key differentiators between digital and traditional marketing: - The ability for digital media to effectively target specific consumer niches - The ability to quickly create and refresh content that is useful to consumers Google's CPG team has also seen the trend towards marketers engaging in two-way conversations with consumers, and has found that a "pull" strategy using search can is an effective product launch technique. To that end, we conducted research with Compete in March 2010; the research took a look at 26 CPG product launches that took place in 2009. Here's what we found: - Share of search referrals increase over time. The more time that passes after a launch, the more reliant consumers become on search engines to help them get to the product page. The study indicates that it can take over 9 weeks to generate awareness for a new product. - 1 in 3 searchers discover a new product brand website by clicking on sponsored links. This illustrates how sponsored links can aid consumers in navigating to the new product page. - Search brings in more non-branded searches to the new product page. This shows how presence on a search engine results page can aid brand association. - Searchers spend twice the amount of time on the new product website than consumers who arrive directly, without using search engines. This confirms that searchers are leaning forward and taking the initiative to search. Therefore, they are more likely to be in-market for the new product than non-searchers. Visit www.youtube.com/fastforward for more details about the Bounce and Betty Crocker's product launches; you can look for them by individual, company, or scroll to the Consumer Packaged Goods category.  URL: http://google-cpg.blogspot.com/2010/07/cpg-product-launches-in-new-digital-age.html   |
| [G] Picasa Web Albums goes on a Picnik Posted: 13 Jul 2010 11:48 AM PDT Google Photos Blog: Picasa Web Albums goes on a PicnikPosted by Thomas Kang and Steve Leroux, Software Engineers forPicasa Web and Picnik A few months back we welcomed Picnik, the powerful online photo editor, into the Google family and today we're happy to share the first of more exciting things to come. Picnik's rich editing tools are now integrated into Picasa Web Albums allowing you to experience them without ever having to leave your account. As long as you're using Picasa in one of the Picnik supported languages, just click 'edit' from the edit drop down menu or from the new handy Picnik icon.  Then, Picnik away by applying an effect, adding a sticker, or exploring your own creative path with advanced tools. When you are done editing your photo, save back to your album by either replacing the existing image or making a new copy.  Sometimes 1+1 really does equal more than 2. Happy Picniking (from right inside of Picasa Web Albums).  URL: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2010/07/picasa-web-albums-goes-on-picnik.html   |
| [G] It's App Tuesday: 10 new apps available in the Google Apps Marketplace today Posted: 13 Jul 2010 11:46 AM PDT Official Google Enterprise Blog: It's App Tuesday: 10 new apps available in the Google Apps Marketplace todayWe're excited to announce the launch of 10 new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace today, joining the more than 150 installable apps made available to Google Apps domains in the Marketplace since March. Instead of spending today patching operating systems, we invite Google Apps users to explore these new applications which can deliver immediate business value to your organization. These apps, like all installable apps in the Marketplace, offer single sign-on with your existing Google Apps user accounts, so there are no new passwords to manage. Beyond single sign-on, many offer deeper data integration with Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar to help users work more efficiently, regardless of which app they happen to be using to get their job done. As a Google Apps administrator, once you install and evaluate an app, you can deploy it to your users in only a few clicks. (watch how this works) Several of the new applications help you manage communications more effectively, from tracking contact with customers and partners to making your inbox more efficient:
Aprigo NINJA for Google Docs provides advanced access management controls for Google Docs, giving organizations greater visibility and control over how documents are shared within and outside of the company. Gliffy makes creating professional-quality flowcharts and diagrams simple, intuitively helping you turn complex information into attractive images everyone can understand Gminutes is your one stop meeting minutes management solution for professionally executing meetings. All you have to do is create your meeting space, add relevant people to it and you are good to go. Meetingmix helps you run meetings. It allows you to easily create agendas, take minutes, and share with attendees. ReachPeople provides easy group alert notifications for critical communications. Now, schools and businesses can send one or thousands of mass notification messages via voice, SMS text, or email. SiteKreator is an online service that allows anyone to instantly design, build and publish elegant, fully-branded, and interactive business websites. TheDeadline is an intelligent Todo-Manager. The system makes collaboration very easy and helps users focus on the most important tasks and keep an overview of large sets of todos. If you've #gonegoogle, and tried the #appsmarketplace, let other users know what you recommend via Twitter or submit your suggestion for additional apps here. Posted by Steven Bazyl, Google Apps Marketplace team  URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/07/its-app-tuesday-10-new-apps-available.html   |
| [G] Google Apps adds more admin controls for mobile devices Posted: 13 Jul 2010 11:46 AM PDT Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Apps adds more admin controls for mobile devicesEarlier this year we announced support for mobile device security policies in Google Apps to help administrators manage iPhone, Nokia, and Windows Mobile devices from the Google Apps control panel. These policies let employees access information from their phones while helping administrators keep corporate data more secure. Today, we are announcing new mobile device management options for Google Apps administrators.Starting this week, these policies will be available to all Google Apps Premier and Education customers. They can be accessed from the 'Mobile' tab under 'Service Settings' in the Google Apps control panel.  It's our mission to provide users with seamless access to their data while allowing enterprise administrators to centrally manage a diverse range of mobile devices. We're working to enhance our device management options and to expand our list of supported devices – including Android later this year. If you have any questions, please check out our Help Center documentation. Posted by Dale Woodford, Software Engineer  URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-apps-adds-more-admin-controls.html   |
| [G] Going Google: a webinar with Brown University Posted: 13 Jul 2010 11:46 AM PDT Official Google Enterprise Blog: Going Google: a webinar with Brown UniversityA few weeks ago, we announced that Brown University has gone Google for all students, staff, and faculty on campus. If you're interested in learning more about why they made this decision, we encourage you to register for the upcoming EDUCAUSE Live! Webcast – part of the Spotlight on Cloud Computing Series – that features Michael Pickett, the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Brown discussing this decision. In this free, hour-long web seminar "Google Apps at Brown," you'll learn how Brown deployed Google Apps to its 6,000 students and why they've decided to extend the service to include faculty and staff as well. Register here to tune in for more information about how these decisions were made, the options they considered, lessons they learned, and successes to date. Wednesday July 14, 2010 1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps EDU team  URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/07/going-google-webinar-with-brown.html   |
| [G] Using The Wrong Tracking Code Can Cost You $500k a Year Posted: 13 Jul 2010 11:26 AM PDT Google Analytics Blog: Using The Wrong Tracking Code Can Cost You $500k a YearThis is a guest post from Tom Critchlow who is an excel ninja, data geek, analytics nerd and head of search for Distilled, a London & Seattle based search agency. Tom provides a cautionary tale on the importance of keeping your site up to date. This blog post title may appear sensational but I assure you that it's not (much...). I recently spotted an issue with a client's e-commerce website which was costing them £100,000 / month in revenue (~$150,000). The fix took 5 minutes. Even more surprisingly, since I've been on the lookout for this issue I've spotted it on quite a significant number of websites. Hence why I got in touch with the Google guys and asked if I could talk about this in front of as many people as possible to try and spread awareness! 1) Graph of Win Firstly, let's take a quick look at a pretty graph. This is comparing revenue month on month before and after the fix was made:  Note the increased revenue! :-) Everyone loves increased revenue. For those with beady eyes you will have spotted that this isn't total revenue on the site but it's just IE8 users. What's going on here? 2) The Issue Before I delve into the issue, let me first give you a little background. When you enter private information online, such as your credit card details, you want to be sure that you're transmitting the information over a secure connection. You can usually tell you're on a secure connection to a website if the page URL begins with https:// instead of http:// Making webpages secure, however, is more resource intensive and so most websites only make their most important pages secure (though Gmail now always uses https:// by default). This means that when you browse a website, for example http://www.amazon.com you will browse around product pages which are all located on http:// URLs. When you want to actually purchase something from the site however you transition over to secure URLs such as https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cart/view.html This is standard practice for e-commerce websites and when you move through the buying funnel you should inevitably transition at some point from a non-secure page (http://) to a secure page (https://). Now, the issue I'm talking about in this post is with the client's site. The site uses Google Analytics however unfortunately they were using the old version of the code and were using the same piece of code across all pages of their site. The code they were using looked a little like this:  Unfortunately, this means that their secure checkout pages such as https://www.example.com/checkout/payment contained non-secure elements - namely the URL call to "http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js". Browsers like Chrome and Firefox don't display a warning but Internet Explorer 8 produced the following security warning when users transitioned from the non-secure (http://) pages to the secure (https://) pages. This error looks like this:  Pretty scary huh! Unsurprisingly this was causing almost all users browsing in Internet Explorer 8 to abandon the shopping process. Since Internet Explorer 8 is one of the most popular browsers on the web this was a huge amount of revenue they were missing out on! 3) How To Fix It This issue arose because of a non-secure HTTP call within a very old version of the Google Analytics tracking code. The fix for this is very simple - just install the new code! The new code is more versatile than the old code and works both on http:// pages and https:// pages so you don't need to worry about using a different code on secure and non-secure pages. The new code looks a little like this:  There's a complete run-through here on using this new code here and specific migration advice. And that's it! It's a simple fix but one that can have significant impact on your bottom line. I repeat what I said at the top of the post - I've seen plenty of sites that suffer from this issue so it's really not as rare as you might think! I should point out here that the Google Analytics code has been able to handle HTTPS and HTTP pages properly since well before the asynchronous code was released, but plenty of sites are still using very old legacy code, which is why this is still an issue for some sites. Also, it's not just the Google Analytics code which can cause problems! Any non-secure elements on a page can cause a security warning so double check your code carefully. 4) How to Diagnose This Issue (simple) If you're wondering if your site suffers from this problem there's a quite easy way of checking by looking at your conversion rate segmented by browser:  Setting up these custom segments is really easy, but to make it even easier I've set them up for you and all you need to do is click these links to add both these segments directly into your Google Analytics account: Then browse to your conversion rate report and select the segments from your custom segments:  5) How to Diagnose This Issue (advanced) Of course, the issue I'm talking about in this post is only a specific issue and plenty of other issues may well exist like it. The underlying principle is that segmenting your funnel is a useful thing to do so that you can see if a specific visitor type are not converting or there is a specific drop-off point for them. Unfortunately there isn't a way of segmenting your funnel within Google Analytics at the moment but there are a few advanced ways of getting around this. For example:
None of these methods quite does what I want it to so I'm presenting a 4th option here: Step 1 - Identify your funnel steps This is fairly straightforward, all you need to do is understand what the URLs look like for your funnel. For example, let's say our funnel looks like this:
Step 2 - Create some regex This is getting slightly more complex, however, assuming that all your URLs are exact match (rather than head match or something more complicated) the regex to create is this: ^/cart/availability$|^/cart/details$|^/cart/extras/$|^/book/check/$|^/book/payment/$|^/book/confirm/$ Where we generate this string as follows:
For a more complete (and very pretty) guide to using regex in Google Analytics download this PDF. Step 3 - Enter this regex in the top content report In the top content report copy and paste this regex into the filter box:  This will then filter the top content report to only show you visits to one of the above pages in your funnel. Now we can see the drop off between steps like we can in the regular funnel. Step 4 - Add custom segments & export to Excel Now, we add whichever custom segments we want (for example IE8 users like above). This gives us each step of the funnel and the visits to each step broken down by segments:  Unfortunately this data is a little bit difficult to analyse as it doesn't give us the drop off percentage. So, to make this data easier to process and analyse export it to Excel. This will allow us to create a nice little table like this (very minimal excel magic required!):  This is an improvement over the simple diagnosis above because it not only shows us that IE8 users are not converting as well as users from other browsers, but it even tells us the exact step where it's a problem (the cell highlighted in red in the image). Looking back at the URLs we've identified we see that this drop off percentage is the same step where a user transitions from HTTP to HTTPS. Note: The super-observant among you may have noticed that there is a potential discrepancy here. The warning message that IE8 throws up allows the user to select the option to only view secure elements on the HTTPS page. If the user selects this option then theoretically the user could still carry on through the site and complete the purchase. This visit and the revenue from this purchase wouldn't be tracked in Google Analytics since the HTTP Google Analytics call is blocked by the browser. So the extra £100,000 / month could in theory only be a reported increase in revenue. In reality however we found that the true bottom line still increased by over £30,000 per month as a result of this change. This implies that displaying the pop-up still has a drastic effect on conversion rates. 6) Conclusion So what have we learned? The key lessons here are as follows:
Remember, the HTTP/HTTPS issue applies equally to all URL calls so even if you use the up-to-date Google Analytics tracking code some other non-secure element on the page might be costing you revenue so always make sure that your website is functioning perfectly across all browsers. If you don't, you might end up losing £360,000 ($500,000) a year or more! Thanks Tom for a thorough look at how to avoid this problem. And to echo Tom's advice, we encourage everyone to move to the newest version of the GA tracking code. You can follow more analytics insights and online marketing tips at the Distilled Blog or follow Tom on Twitter. Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team  URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-wrong-tracking-code-can-cost-you.html   |
| [G] App Tuesday: 10 new apps in the Google Apps Marketplace Posted: 13 Jul 2010 10:08 AM PDT Official Google Blog: App Tuesday: 10 new apps in the Google Apps MarketplaceWhile many IT departments spend the second Tuesday of the month patching the operating systems on their servers, Google Apps customers running their business in the cloud have some free time to evaluate and roll-out new applications. Lucky for them, today there are 10 new apps available today in the Google Apps Marketplace.Several of the new applications help you manage communications more effectively, from tracking contact with customers and partners to de-cluttering your inbox:
Posted by Ryan Boyd, Google Apps Marketplace team  URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/app-tuesday-10-new-apps-in-google-apps.html   |
| [G] Follow Team HTC-Columbia on Google Maps and Then Let Others Follow You Posted: 13 Jul 2010 10:07 AM PDT Official Google Mobile Blog: Follow Team HTC-Columbia on Google Maps and Then Let Others Follow YouIn case you missed it, check out the Official Google Blog's post about how Team HTC-Columbia is using Android-powered phones and a special version of the My Tracks app with SRM to share real-time data from the Tour de France. Head over to google.com/mytrackstour to follow along during the race and see riders' real-time location along with their power, heart rate, cadence and speed right on Google Maps. Want to record some of this data or share your location on Google Maps during your next big ride? Track your rides, runs, or walks in detail with the My Tracks app on your Android-powered phone. From many popular smartphones, you can share your location with friends using Google Latitude and then publish your location to the web with the Google Public Location Badge. Posted by Chris Nguyen, Google Mobile Team  URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/07/follow-team-htc-columbia-on-google-maps.html   |
| [G] FriendFeed Subscriber counts not reported since July 10 Posted: 13 Jul 2010 07:13 AM PDT The FeedBurner Status Blog: FriendFeed Subscriber counts not reported since July 10Issue:FriendFeed subscriber counts have not been reported since 10-Jul. We are in contact with FriendFeed to help resolve this issue. While publishers will a notice corresponding drop in their subscriber counts this is a reporting problem only and in no way affects feed delivery.Update (6:35pm PST 13-Jul): FriendFeed has resumed feed polling. Expect subscriber counts to be restored for the stats day representing 13-Jul.  URL: http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/07/friendfeed-subscriber-counts-not.html   |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Googland To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment