Saturday, February 26, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Mastering Unique Visitors in the API

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 03:52 PM PST

Google Analytics Blog: Mastering Unique Visitors in the API

After launching a massive amount of new data through our Data Export API, our developers gave us a lot of great feedback back and support. Thanks! Now we want to show you how to master this data to make better business decisions, starting with the unique visitors metric.

In this blog post, we ask Analytics team members to give us their favorite ways to request and use unique visitor data. Next, we translate that into an API query along with screen shots of how the data looks. Finally, we give you a deep link to the query explorer tool so you can make that same API request with your own data right now. Let's Go!

(Note: You can do most of these queries using Custom Reports through the Google Analytics web interface.)

Query example #1: Measuring Total Unique Visitors
Before we start using suggested queries, let's lay the ground work with a very simple query for unique visitors.

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&metrics=ga:visitors
&start-date=2011-01-01
&end-date=2011-01-31

This query retrieves the total unique visitors to our site for the month of January.

Here's a sample screen shot of the results.

You can click this link to execute this query with your own data. Simple!

Query example #2: Monthly, Weekly, and Daily Unique Visitors

Ok, the query above was easy. So maybe we want to know how many of these users are active users. Hetal Thakkar, the engineer who implemented the processing logic for this metric, says it's easy with the following query:

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&dimensions=ga:week
&metrics=ga:visitors
&start-date=2011-01-02
&end-date=2011-02-12

Awesome Hetal! All we need to do is add the ga:week time dimension to get weekly unique visitors or as we say at Google, "7-day actives."



In fact, you can measure active users for other time periods by using ga:year, ga:month, ga:day or even ga:hour instead. This gives you the measure of what advertisers call "reach."

Query example #3: Hourly Unique Visitors by City

Recently an agency wanted to understand how many unique visitors would visit their site after airing a TV commercial. They exported hourly unique visitors by region, and ran some additional statistical analysis.

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&dimensions=ga:region,ga:city,ga:hour
&metrics=ga:visitors
&filters=ga:region==California
&sort=ga:region,ga:city,ga:hour
&start-date=2011-01-01
&end-date=2011-01-01
&max-results=50

Here we use both the ga:region and ga:city dimensions to get the number of unique visitor by city. Even though we use a filter to only get data from California, we add the region dimension to make the report easier to read. We then use ga:hour to get hourly unique visitors by city. Since the TV ads were only running in California, we use the filters parameter to filter by region. We also limit the date range to the day the ad ran.

Here are a few results from Alameda, California.

Now you are ready to analyze the online impact of your offline campaigns, such as radio and TV.

You can apply the unique visitors metric to almost any existing report to get amazing new insights.

Query Example #4: Mobile Unique Visitors By Country

Ivanna Kartarahardja is a software engineer on the Google Analytics API team. She did a lot of the coding to make this data available through the API. Thank you Ivanna!

One of her favorite reports is looking at mobile unique visitors by country.

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&dimensions=ga:country
&metrics=ga:visitors
&segment=dynamic::ga:isMobile==Yes
&filters=ga:subContinent==Western%20Europe
&sort=ga:country
&start-date=2011-01-01
&end-date=2011-01-15
&max-results=50

In this query we use a dynamic advanced segment to only query users who have come from a mobile device. We also added a filter to only look for mobile traffic from Western Europe.


See your own data in the Query Explorer

This report is also very useful if you are trying to measure the performance of your mobile application using either our Google Analytics Andriod SDK or iOS SDK. Metrics like this help you decide which languages and regions to invest in.

Query Example #5: nique Visitors by Mobile Device

Jeetendra Soneja is the Lead Engineer for the Google Analytics APIs. His favorite report is to look at mobile unique visitors by platform. He thinks this is a great way to identify which platforms to invest resources into.

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&dimensions=ga:operatingSystem
&metrics=ga:visitors
&segment=dynamic::ga:isMobile==Yes
&sort=-ga:visitors
&start-date=2011-01-01
&end-date=2011-01-15
&max-results=50


See your own data in the Query Explorer

Notice how in the last two queries we're using a dynamic advanced segment to only look at a specific segment of all users (dynamic::ga:isMobile==Yes). We can then apply any of our useful dimensions to gain more insight about those specific users.

Query Example #6: Measuring Site Loyalty

Sagnik Nandy oversees data processing for Google Analytics. You met him in Web Analytics TV #16, and he always has clever tricks on how to build complex queries. He likes using visit count to measure site loyalty.

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&metrics=ga:visitors
&segment=dynamic::ga:visitCount=~^[4-9]
&start-date=2011-01-01
&end-date=2011-01-31
&max-results=50

Here we will get back the number of visitors that have visited the sites between 4 and 9 times resulting in a custom loyalty report. Since ga:visitCount* is a dimension, which is a string, we use a regular expression to match all values between 4 and 9.

*In this query segment, a visitor that visits the site 5 times will only have his/her 4th and 5th sessions included, but not the 1st to 3rd sessions (More documentation on ga:visitCount).

See your own data in the Query Explorer

Query Example #7: Visitor Based Conversion Rate

Avinash Kaushik is the Analytics Evangelist at Google. He has a best selling book about web analytics, and a great use case. Google Analytics uses session-based metrics for most of its performance calculations. For example, conversion rate = conversions / visits. Most unique visitors will not convert every time they come to your site. So sometimes it might be better to calculate conversion rate as conversions / visitors.

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&dimensions=ga:source
&metrics=ga:visitors,ga:goalCompletionsAll
&filters=ga:medium==organic
&sort=-ga:visitors
&start-date=2011-01-01
&end-date=2011-01-15
&max-results=5

Here we look at the top organic search engines, but now let's request the goalCompletionsAll metric. Of course, you can easily use any of the 20 individual goals, the number of transactions or events, or the total revenue for this calculation if you prefer.


See your own data in the Query Explorer

By now you should see you can get unique visitors for almost any dimension in Google Analytics!

Query Example #8: Visitor Loyalty Per Content Section

Patricia Boswell is the lead of our documentation efforts for Google Analytics. Measuring performance of the content that is produced is very important to her. She likes to use the unique visitors metric to report the number of unique visitors who visit a specific content section of the site. She then compares that to the number of unique pageviews to get a sense of how frequently unique visitors are viewing specific set of pages.

https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
?ids=<tableId>
&metrics=ga:visitors,ga:uniquePageviews
&filters=ga:pagePath=~product
&start-date=2011-01-01
&end-date=2011-01-15

Here we apply a filter which uses a regular expression to match any pages that have the word "product" in their URL. Using the advanced segment returns all sessions, which had at least one pageview that included the word "product." Google Analytics then returns the number of unique visitors for those sessions.



So if we divide unique pageviews (276) by unique visitors (249), we get 1.10, which is the frequency that unique visitors visit a product page.

Let's compare this to frequency of unique visitors visiting our support section. All we do is change the query to filter the ga:pagePath dimension on the word "support."

&filters=ga:pagePath=~support

And we get:


We see here that the pageviews per visitor ratio for the support section is 2.85 (= 342/120).

So while more unique visitors saw the product pages, unique visitors were more engaged on the support section. This might influence your content development strategy by considering cross selling products and services within the content section vs the product section.

See your own data in the Query Explorer

Your Turn!

With the addition of unique visitors to the API, you can gain even more insight about your customers. We encourage you to democratize your data by sharing this article with colleagues and friends. Also we'd love to hear your best use cases for using unique visitors in the comments section below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, on behalf of all the people who made this data possible through the API!
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/02/mastering-unique-visitors-in-api.html

[G] New Features For iOS/iPhone SDK

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 03:52 PM PST

Google Analytics Blog: New Features For iOS/iPhone SDK

Back in December, we brought you custom variables for your Android applications. Today,
we're doing the same for our iOS SDK by releasing version 1.1 of the Google Analytics SDK for iPhone with Custom Variable support. We are also offering a NoThumb version of this SDK.

Custom variables can be used to segment your users and provide actionable context. Some great use cases are:
  • Free vs paid: What percentage of users prefer a paid app vs. a free app that delivers ads? Are you making more money on the free version or the paid version?
  • Installs by version: What version of your app gained the most users? What version lost users? How quickly are users upgrading?
  • Portrait vs. landscape: Do your users prefer to use your application in portrait mode or landscape mode?
For more great ways to use Custom variables in mobile applications, check out Alex Lucas' great blog post for the Andriod SDK.

In addition, we are providing support for NoThumb with our SDK. We have a NoThumb version of the library as well as the standard, Thumb version. This NoThumb version is available for developers that need the Thumb instruction set disabled in their applications.

Posted by Jim Cotugno, Google Analytics Tracking Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-features-for-iosiphone-sdk.html

[G] U.K. P.M. David Cameron answers your questions on Libya, budget cuts and more, in YouTube interview

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 03:26 PM PST

YouTube Blog: U.K. P.M. David Cameron answers your questions on Libya, budget cuts and more, in YouTube interview

Last week we asked you to submit your questions for U.K. Prime Minister, David Cameron, and you responded with 10,000 questions across topics like the violence in the Middle East, global arms trade, and tuition fees for U.K. students.

Today, in a special interview produced by YouTube World View and Al Jazeera English, you can get to see how the Prime Minister tackles a selection of the questions you voted to the top - including his thoughts on what should be done in Libya, whether banks in the U.K. should pay increased taxes, and what Britain's role is in Afghanistan. Watch the full interview here:



You can also see how Cameron and a host of other leaders across various disciplines answered the same "Big Three" questions -- questions like "what is the biggest problem facing the next generation and what can we do to solve it?" and "if you could ask any other leader a questions, what would it be and who would you ask it to?" --  by going to www.youtube.com/worldview and clicking on the "Big Three Questions" tab.

We'll announce our next YouTube World View interview in the coming weeks, so check back here for more details soon.



Ramya Raghavan, News and Politics Manager, and Jayme Goldstein, U.K. Product Marketing Manager, recently watched "A Girl Like Me"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/_9u4wXbive0/uk-pm-david-cameron-answers-your.html

[G] Google Voice & the Snowpocalypse

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 02:23 PM PST

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice & the Snowpocalypse

We're often inspired by the creative and interesting ways that individuals and organizations use Google Voice, so we thought it was time to start sharing some of their stories. In the first of what we hope to be an ongoing series of interviews, we chatted with Todd Stanfield, an Associate Professor from Jackson, TN, who used Google Voice to communicate with his students during the snowpocalypse of 2011.

1. Tell us a little bit about you.
I am Todd Stanfield, PhD. I am an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Union University in Jackson, TN. I teach both undergraduate and graduate social work students.

2. How are you using Google Voice?
I collect phone numbers from students via a Google Docs form, then I text them via Google Voice to let them know when class is cancelled. Google Voice makes it possible to reach them instantly via their phones (which they always have with them) in addition to their email (which they may only check when at a desktop).

Some of them don't have smart phones, so getting the text message in addition to an email means the difference between finding out about class being canceled during a 2 hour drive vs. arriving at campus only to find out class has been canceled.

I also have them respond with an SMS confirming they got it so I can quickly mark off everyone who has responded, and I have a record that they did so.

3. Sounds effective. How else has Google Voice helped you out?
I also use Google Voice as a second voicemail service that puts a layer of protection between my personal cell phone and my students. They call my Google Voice number, I get a transcript of their message via SMS and email, then I decide whether I need to respond right then. Helps me set boundaries between my personal and professional time.

If you or someone you know is using Google Voice in a unique way, we'd love to hear about it! Fill out this short form and your story may get featured on the Google Voice blog.

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-voice-snowpocalypse.html

[G] Guest Post: Google Docs for Classroom Instruction

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 10:52 AM PST

Docs Blog: Guest Post: Google Docs for Classroom Instruction

Cross-posted on the the Google Enterprise Blog

Guest Post: Philip Greenspun is a pioneer in developing online communities and an educator who has taught electrical engineering and computer science courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1987. Today he explains how he used Google Docs to develop and distribute curricular materials and to support in-classroom discussion of student solutions.

In 1983, I began building applications to support multi-user collaboration over the Internet. When I began using the World Wide Web in 1993 I vowed never to write a native application program again and said "every desktop computer program going forward should simply run in a Web browser." Since the main reason to prepare a document was for others to view, I predicted that everyone would be using browser-based word processors and spreadsheet programs by the year 2000. I am still waiting for my "everyone goes to work in a flying car" prediction to come true also...

In January 2011, four of us were developing an entirely new course for MIT students, an intensive lab-based SQL programming and Android development class. All of us are proficient Web developers accustomed to authoring pages in standard text editors and publishing them on our own servers, but it turned out to be easier and more effective to use Google Docs to collaboratively develop course materials. Google Docs was more effective because simultaneous updates could proceed in different areas of a document and we weren't slowed down by having to do explicit check-ins with a standard version control system (or circulate drafts with names such as "DayOneProblems-final-version-by-philg-really-really-final"). Also, the "insert a comment" feature of Google Docs proved useful, e.g., when I wasn't sure if an example program was correct and wanted to ask a collaborator to check, but without leaving crud in the main body of the document.

We created two Google Docs folders the night before class: lessons, editable by us and view-only for students; workspace, editable by everyone. Into the "lessons" folder we moved the first day's assignment. In the "workspace" folder we created a "Day 1 Workspace" document intended for students to cut and paste code into. As each student walked into the classroom, we asked him or her to email a teacher from his or her Google Account (most students already had Gmail and some experience with Google Docs) and the teacher would share both folders with the new student, immediately enabling access to all lessons.

As the course materials had never been used before, they contained some errors and many sections that lacked sufficient hints or explanations. When we noticed these deficiencies, e.g., when a student asked a question, we would edit the problem set from a teacher's laptop and all students would immediately see the change on the projector and/or on their own screens.

Google Docs enabled us to distribute solutions incrementally. The first morning we created a "Day 1 Solutions (January 2011)" document and dragged it into the lessons (view-only for students) folder. As the day progressed, when 90 percent of the students were done with a problem, we would add the solution to the end of this document (by copying from another Google Doc, of course) so that students would have it in front of them and be prepared for the discussion.

The shared Google Docs workspace documents enabled us to have students paste their work into shared documents that could be used for projection and discussion and also for members of the class to try out each other's SQL queries.

To gather feedback at the end of the course, we simply created a feedback document and put it into the workspace folder, then used the "email editors/viewers" feature (from the Share menu) to ask students to add their thoughts, including whether they liked Google Docs ("great for sharing solutions"; "very effective"; "Generally yes, I did get a little confused with all the browser tabs I had open"; "very efficient and comfortable"; "green too").

We were technical people teaching a technical course, but everything that we did with Google Docs would have been easy for a person without any programming or HTML authoring background. Google Docs was an important asset for our course and significantly enhanced the in-classroom experience.

You can read more about our experience, including our wishlist, at http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/using-google-docs-for-classroom-instruction.

Posted by Philip Greenspun, founder of photo.net and co-author of Software Engineering for Internet Applications.
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/guest-post-google-docs-for-classroom.html

[G] Dealing with label overload

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 09:54 AM PST

Official Gmail Blog: Dealing with label overload

Posted by Stanley Chen, Software Engineer

Many Gmail power users have elaborate label systems to help organize their mail -- some help file and retrieve mail, others help manage their attention.

We created the "Hide read labels" and "Hide Labels from Subjects" labs to help people manage their ever-growing lists of labels. Given the popularity and usefulness of these labs, we've decided to graduate them into fully-fledged features. We've also made a few improvements to how they work. First, instead of simply hiding all labels from subject lines, you can now choose which labels to show or hide. We also spiffed up and organized the Labels tab in Settings as well as the dropdown menus for each label in the label list.


If you had enabled either Labs feature, your settings should automatically be carried over. If there was a glitch in the matrix, or if you want to change the visibility for a bunch of labels quickly, you can adjust them en masse by going to the Labels tab in Settings.
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/dealing-with-label-overload.html
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