Google Docs Gets Lots of Updates Google Docs added lots of new stuff, including saved searches, offline Google Gears access for spreadsheets and presentations, custom document stylesheets (using CSS), speaker notes in presentations, and embedded YouTube videos in presentations.
Move Your Life To Gmail With Gmail Uploader Google released last month the Gmail Uploader, a free application that moves your email and contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird (on Windows XP and Vista only) to a Google Apps Gmail account. Considering the huge number of limitations (only three email programs, two operating systems, and one very specific and less popular edition of Gmail), you may never get the chance to use it, which is a shame, because most new Gmail users would love the easy migration method.
Google Charts Now Does QR Codes
Google has been trying out QR Codes (a type of 2D bar codes) in its print ads, and now they’re making it easier to generate them on the web. Before, you’d have to use a web app or software to create a QR Code, then save the image to use on your website, but now the Google Chart API can be queried to get them automatically. Right now, all you get are website URLs, though hopefully Google will extend the API to handle more complex data.
Here’s an API-generated image for this site, using the URL http://chartserver.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http://google.blognewschannel.com/:
Blogger Adds Future Posts
Google’s Blogger has added the ability to schedule posts to be published in the future by specifying a date yet to come for your post. This feature was tested in Blogger In Draft, and is yet another feature to make its way into the ever improving Blogger.
Google Invests In New Clearwire Google entered into an agreement with Sprint and others (Comcast, Intel Capital, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Trilogy Equity Partners), investing half a billion dollars in a new formation of wireless ISP Clearwire. The new company will be 51% Sprint-owned, taking Sprint’s Xohm WiMax business. Google’s a wireless provider of sorts, now, and will help get open devices, including Android devices, on the network, and provide search and applications for the network.
Google Me - A Documentary About Search
This documentary features a guy searching for others with this same name as him. A concept we’ve heard before, though it seems to have resulted in an interest project.
Google’s Head of PR Goes to Facebook
Elliot Schrage leaves for Facebook, costing Google its vice president of global communications and public affairs. Of course, Google’s corporate PR policies haven’t been that smart the last few years, so maybe this isn’t great news for Facebook.
Google Maps Interface Slimmed Down
Google has finally trimmed some of the cruft building on Google Maps, combining and simplifying an interface that was getting too complicated and cluttered.
Blogger Gets Integrated Analytics
Google has integrated Google Analytics into Blogger for Blogger users that are interested, giving access to stats inside the Blogger Dashboard along with special stats tracking relevant to blogs. They’re also letting Measure Map users roll over their accounts into Google Analytics now.
Google has released a beta of the first version of its Urchin Software package since Google bought the company almost three years ago. Google bought Urchin in March 2005, later releasing Urchin’s hosted web analytics service as Google Analytics, but Urchin customers have been waiting for years for a new version of the Urchin Software product. That wait is thankfully, finally over.
The new version of Urchin is available for download as a free beta, which will expire in three months. Owners of Urchin 5 will get a free upgrade when the beta ends, and new customers can purchase the software for $2995. The beta period represents the perfect time to trial Urchin and see if it is worth purchasing in three months, so download the beta and give it a shot.
Google Urchin Software runs on Linux, Windows or FreeBSD servers. Features include:
Pagetags or IP+User Agent: Choose which methodology works best for you. You can even have the pagetags make a call to your Google Analytics account and run both products together allowing you to audit the pre and post processed data.
Advanced Visitor Segmentation: Cross segment visitor behavior by language, geographic location, and other factors.
Geo-targeting: Find out where your visitors come from and which markets have the greatest profit potential.
Funnel Optimization: Eliminate conversion bottlenecks and reduce the numbers of prospects who drift away unconverted.
Complete Conversion Metrics: See ROI, revenue per click, average visitor value and more.
Keyword Analysis: Compare conversion metrics across search engines and keywords.
A/B Testing: Test banner ads, emails, and keywords and fine-tune your creative content for better results.
Ecommerce Analytics: Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics, and see product merchandising reports.
Search engine robots, server errors and file type reports: Get the stuff that only log data can report on.
Google took a long time developing this software, presumably relegating it to a low priority status over the last few years. Google provides a backwards warning in the FAQ that future development, if any, will depend on how successful this version is.
Will Google continue developing Urchin Software after this release? Although Google does not provide specifics on future product development, if demand is strong, we anticipate continuing development on Urchin Software.
Running Urchin Software is not a small manner. The distribution is 700 megabytes, but the Urchin database grows ten gigabytes for every one million page views. That means a site like Gizmodo would need 162.6 gigabytes of storage space for their web statistics… every week. For the year, Urchin would require 8.48497 terabytes of space, a daunting, almost impossible amount.
Some other improvements in Urchin Software over Urchin 5:
Additional goals and funnel steps
Cross-segmentation options that allow you to view metrics sliced into dimensions such as by referring source, keyword, country, city, browser type, and more.
Improved user interface is presentation-ready Flash-based graphics instead of SVG
More robust log processing engine
E-commerce and campaign tracking are included, no more module additions
Vastly improved embedded scheduler to more easily and smoothly arrange processing and re-processing jobs
Numerous security enhancements including an updated Apache webserver
Improved translation interfaces in all languages
Configuration database now uses standard relational backend (including MySQL and PostgreSQL)
Google wants you to change the code you use for Google Analytics, in order to support better the features in the new version. You have a year, at the least, before the old code stops working, but you won’t get all the cool new stuff until you update. Just add this new code in place of your old, code, replacing UA-YOURNUMBER-1 with your account ID number:
If you are confused, clickthe “Check Status” link in your Analytics account, and it’ll run you through everything. If you are tracking subdomains, add this line before the pageTracker._initData(); line:
Today at the eMetrics Summit in D.C., Google unveiled some new features for Google Analytics, as well as a new version of its Urchin hosted wed analytics software.
First up, what’s new for Google Analytics: Head into your Analytics profile and enable “Site Search” (which is not currently available in my account), and the Content section of Analytics will show you the keywords people are using to find your site.
Located in the Content section of your Google Analytics reporting interface, Site Search reports show you the keywords and search refinement keywords people use, the pages from which people begin and end their searches. You can also see how search on your site affects site usage, conversion rates, and e-commerce activity.
They also added a new Event Tracking capability, which shows you how people use interactive elements on your site (like AJAX, Flash and multimedia). All you need to do to get the new feature is change your JavaScript from urchin.js to ga.js (plus you’ll get future new features with it). They’re seperately starting a beta test of an Outbound Link Tracking feature, though users on the older JavaScript will be getting it first.
FInally, Google announced a limited beta test of Urchin 6, the first new version of Urchin in over two years. Urchin is the hosted version of the analytics software Google Analytics is based on. It runs on your server and analyzes your detailed site logs, and not just the slice of data Google Analytics has access to. Ars has some details on it, and I’ll bet we’ll be hearing more about what it brings to the table in the coming weeks.
You can go here or to similar Google Analytics Consultants to get in on the limited beta.
One developer has created an application that lets you access all your Google Analytics data in a powerful Adobe Integrated Runtime application. If you wanted something a little more snappy than the web interface and enjoy using AIR, this could be for you. Even though Google Analytics doesn’t actually have an API, Google is working with the developer to stabilize it and elminate security concerns.
(via TechCrunch)
Okay, the Google Analytics guys are doing scary good work, putting out the second update to version two in just the last few months. This time, they’ve added:
A “Go To:” box in reports with tables, so you can jump to any row in the table. Easy way to jump down several thousand rows, if you need to.
The map overlay now shows the map divided up by countries (previously, it divided by sub-continents).
New Segment menu on Content reports, letting you “cross-segment pages and sets of pages by referral source, keyword, visitor type, and other visitor segments”.
You can now drill down in the Content by Title report to find URLs sharing page titles, letting you analyze and change/fix them.
Today is also the first day you can no longer go back to the old Analytics interface. Analytic 1.0, we’ll miss you, but we’re too busy enjoying version two to mourn.
You Gotta love the Webware 100 Awards. With ten winners per category, every multi-billion-dollar corporation can win multiple times, often in every category! Gee, it’s just like the Oscars!
Here’s what Google won:
Google Reader won in the Browsing category, Gmail won in the Communications category, Google won in the Data category, YouTube won in the Media category, GOOG-411 won in the Mobile category*, Gmail Mobile won in the Mobile category, Google Maps Mobile won in the Mobile category, Google AdWords/AdSense won in the Productivity and Commerce category, Google Calendar won in the Productivity and Commerce category, Google Docs won in the Productivity and Commerce category, Blogger, won in the Publishing category, Feedburner in the Publishing category, Google Analytics won in the Publishing category, and Google Maps won in the reference category.
Other companies:
My Yahoo - Browsing; Yahoo Mail - Communication, Yahoo Messenger - Communications; Yahoo Search - Data; Flickr - Media; Yahoo Video - Media; Yahoo OneSearch - Mobile; Yahoo Maps - Reference.
Internet Explorer - Browsing; Windows Live Hotmail - Communications; Windows Live Messenger - Communications; Windows Live Search - Data; TellMe - Mobile; Microsoft Office Live - Productivity and Commerce; Silverlight - Publishing; Microsoft Virtual Earch - Reference.
Everyone else makes an appearance, and in most categories, every major player is a winner. I love award shows where everyone wins. It’s like those Little Leagues where everyone gets a trophy and no one learns to be an adult.
(via The Google Analytics Blog)
* - cough, bullshit, cough. It’s a brand new service, and unless it feeds the homeless, it deserves nothing yet. Category filler.
The new MeasureMap-strengthened Google Analytics has left beta, and with it comes a few new abilities. Analytics now shows hourly data (though not up to an hour ago, maybe more like 29 hours ago), it lets you clicked listed URLs and go to the website (like referrers), the listing of drops in the bounce rate with red highlights, and more search engines are tracked. Andy Beal has screenshots of the new features, and there’s more at Search Engine Journal.
The Google Analytics blog announces that they’ve completed rolling out the new version of Google Analytics to everyone, so all users should be able to access it now in their account. Just log into Analytics, and you’ll see on the main page a link to “View Reports - New Beta”, as well as a link below it for “Previous Interface” if you need some time to get acclimated to the new one. The old interface will be available through July 18.
First impressions? It seems like there’s a lot of duplicate screens. I click, and I see the exact same data. Maybe its because I don’t have enough seperate sites, and because I haven’t really set up any goal tracking, but I am seeing the same data, over and over. The interface is bolder and simpler, but it’s gonna take some work to really unlock the power of it. Luckily, unlike the old interface, it looks like it should be much easier to figure out.
Sitemeter, one of the popular free web analytics tools, is finally updating its ugly-as-dirt look to something far more modern and usable. Mashable reports this with a screenshot, but doesn’t have much information as to new features or when it will be rolled out, although the Sitemeter blog said last week it would be within “a matter of days”. The Sitemeter homepage has screenshots of the new “Interests” and “Demographics” reports.
(Found on Findory)
Interestingly, I noticed yesterday a survey Microsoft was running for its in-testing analytics service, codenamed Gatineau. Microsoft was getting participants to its survey by advertising on Google for the term “sitemeter”.
I suspected that either MeasureMap was a wasted acquisition, or they were being tasked with fixing the overcomplicated and user-unfriendly interface that Google Analytics bore. As recently as yesterday, I asked “What happened to MeasureMap”? Well, turns out that yesterday’s redesign of Google Analytics, while something most people haven’t seen yet, is a success, was done by those same MeasureMap guys. Why am I not suprised?
MeasureMap was known for having a great-looking interface, and apparently Google saw a solution in it. Took them over a year, but the wait may have been more than worth it. Read Jeff Veen’s blog post about the redesign, and his new job:
It’s been well over a year since Google bought Measure Map and I left Adaptive Path. And wow, have we been busy.
…
Well, the waiting is finally over - we can talk about what we’ve been working on all this time. Today, a completely redesigned version of Google Analytics is launching, bringing a lot of the simplicity and data visualization techniques we learned building Measure Map to a whole new scale.
On a personal note, I’ve got a much different job now that the design work on Analytics has wrapped up. I now lead a team of over 30 designers and researchers responsible for the user experience of Google’s web applications. We’re working on Gmail, Calendar, the Office-like tools, Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, Talk and a bunch more.
Holy crap. Jeff Veen is running Google user experience design. That means the Analytics update is our first look at future updates to Gmail and other very important tools. That’s great news, and it also means you should probably check out MeasureMap just for a glimpse at the future. It’s beginning to look like the acquisition of MeasureMap may have been one of Google’s best acquisitions period. Veen’s fingerprints are going to be all over some coming redesigns, and that means we all win.
Google just got a whole lot better.
I didn’t even realize it was him writing the announcement on the official Google blog. Look at the title: “Jeff Veen, UI Design Manager”.
(via Kottke)
Google today is launching a much-improved interface for Google Analytics, according to Andy Beal. Andy has screenshots of the new interface (which I cannot access as of this writing), which has much bolder graphics to enable clearer to understand graphs, email reports, customizable dashboards so you get the data you want, and plainer language used to describe part of the interface.
The last part is key, because Analytics currently is a mashup of terms that don’t actually help you get right to the information you want. I barely use Analytics anymore, because I have to hunt through menus to find simple things like referrers…
Is it under Content Optimization, where I do all my work? Let me check under Content Perfomance. No? Okay, how about Marketing Optimization, even though I don’t do marketing. Hmm, I bet it’s under Unique Visitor Tracking, since I’m looking for where visitors came from. No? Damn! Okay, what about Visitor Segment Performance. Ah, there! A link for Referring Source. Okay, so this new Tech Dispenser thing is sending me a lot of people. Lets see some detail. Click the Arrow, then Cross Segment Performance, then Source. Nope, nothing there. How about Content? There we go, top referrers from that site! Now, I can click these links to see the referring page, right? What do you mean they aren’t links?!? Kill me!!!
All users should expect the new version in the next 30 days, and new accounts should already have it. Thank god. I wonder if I was onto something with my MeasureMap ruminating? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the clearer graphics came from there, and maybe some of the other code.
Almost fifteen months ago, Google bought MeasureMap, a company which made a really cool blog stats service. It seemed like they planned on doing something with it, maybe integrating it into Blogger or as a simpler version of Google Analytics, but instead absolutely nothing happened. MeasureMap has been closed all this time to new users, I’m not even sure what happened with their old users, and as far as we know, Google did nothing with it (except hire the people who ran it).
What happened? Did Google just want to hire Jeff Veen? Maybe the development of the new Blogger pushed everything else to the back burner? Maybe someone on the Blogger team, now that the move to the new Blogger is complete, should look into offering it as a service built into the Blogger dashboard. Can’t just waste it, especially since people had some really good things to say about it.
(via Digg)
I am so sick of the news on this blog being, on average, a week old. Its my fault. I let these tabs build and build and build, and I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy amassing tabs, and when I finally do write something, it’s a week old. Dammit! I am so not doing this anymore. I hate missing news, but it is beyond stupid to have late and irellevant news because you don’t want to miss anything.
And because of that, here’s everything I’ve got, leading up to just about today:
Google acquired video game advertising company AdScape, which everyone knew was coming. They are competing with Microsoft’s acquisition, Massive, which is far more massive and successful. Google will likely use an automated system and have the same success they had with dMarc, which is to say, none at all.
There’s an easter egg in there. In most of the themes, just visit the page at 3:14 am (get it? Pi time!) and you’ll see something funny happen. Screenshots at Google System.
Google AdSense is doing Pay-Per-Action ads, that pay out when the user clicking the ad actually does something, like buy something or fill out a form. The ads come with a rotating product format, and even embeddable text links, so you can write about a product and link to it as an ad, just like an Amazon affiliate link.
Arrington’s right when he says Google has crossed a line here. We’ll have to see if they’ve crossed the wrong line. Hopefully, unlike the Google referral ads, Google will never make this available to all AdSense publishers, instead holding it for trustworthy publishers.
Philipp has done this page that puts search queries from AOL’s privacy leak of last year with random images from Google Images, resulting in fun and poignant statement. My favorite is when the dog says, “I’m searching for ‘cute glitter myspace’”
Google is classifying some “second class” employees as hourly workers, with compulsory unpaid lunch breaks and other breaks, limits on overtime, and the “threat of a black mark on the review of anyone who fails to punch in properly to the time-tracking window on their desktops.” Yoiks.
Yahoo has released a new version of Yahoo Widgets, the former Konfabulator. New features include a Widget Dock, auto-updating widgets, hidden widgets, 40% improved performance/memory usage, a FLickr widget, and lots of stuff for widget developers.
Google revealed today at the Emetrics Summit in DC a new tool called Google Website Optimizer, which will help AdWords publishers optimize their landing pages to get more conversions. After all, the more effective Google’s advertisers ads are, the more money they’ll have to spend at Google. Timothy Seward covered the announcement, and has a lot of specific details:
Specifically, Google’s new multivarient landing page testing and optimization tool, Website Optimizer, enables marketers to test different ideas for variations of headlines, promotional copy, or images and provides easy-to-read graphs showing which variations resonate best with their website visitors. Through the step-by-step interface, you can quickly and easily plug in the different versions of each page section you wish to test.
Google Website Optimizer automatically applies these versions to create every possible different combination of landing pages, and randomly displays each combination to your users as they come in from your Google AdWords campaign. You simply set up the experiment, plug in your variables, and read the comprehensive reports as the experiment progresses with each click.
Google Analytics has expanded the number of profiles you can have from about 10, all the way up to 50. Pretty good, now that it lets you track a significant number of websites.
(via Cristian Mezei)
Greg Linden reports that AOL has shut down their research department, following the big search privacy scandal that emanated from that department. Now, one commenter says on of the people they fired after the scandal basically was the whole department, but if AOL was serious about trying some research efforts, it is still disheartening to see them give up on it. AOL has so much customer data that could be a wealth of knowledge in the hands of the right researchers. Maybe they could outsource all their customer data to Google, which owns 5% of AOL anyway, as long as Google remains as tight-lipped as we all know them to be.
By the by, if you want to talk about some interesting data, Greg’s been writing about a paper Google released about Bigtable, Google’s massive and robust distributed database system. In his latest post, he notes that the paper cites Google’s web crawl as containing 850 terabytes of data, while Google Analytics has 250 terabytes. Is it just me, or does that seem like a big waste given that (a) Google search earns billions of dollars and (b) Google Analytics loses money. Hmm…
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Google has removed the invite waiting period for Google Analytics. Now, finally, you can sign up for the completely free, world-class website stats service right on the google.com/analytics home page. And yet, Gmail remains invite only. If you haven’t already, submit your bet when Gmail leaves beta for a chance to win a DVD.
(via Andy)
Google has released a beta of the first version of its 
