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Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

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When I was on my dashboard, the graph at the top was not visible, but the other graphs etc were there such as sparklines etc.
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I have recently installed the Google Chrome browser. Up until now I have used Firefox as my primary web browser, but I’m starting to sway towards Chrome.

I’m using the beta version that lets you synchronise bookmarks etc and I have to say I’m impressed so far. The speed seems faster (page loads etc) than Firefox and it doesn’t seem to use quite as much RAM in task manager (I’m on Windows).

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Google seems to be trialling scrollable Adsense ads. On some websites with Adsense ads, there are now two little arrows under the ad. Clicking on them scrolls the ad to the left or right and then more ads are shown.

The two arrows are shown in the example ad above. (not clickable here because it’s an image)

There’s chatter in the blogoshpere lately that Google has changed the way it registers clicks on ads. The way they used to work was that if anyone clicked anywhere on a Google ad, the click was registered and you are forwarded to the advertising website.

Now, with this change, the only “clickable” parts of an ad are the Title and the URL parts.

This could make people’s adsense revenue dip slightly, and we’ll see by how much in the coming weeks.

Wordtracker have just released a cool free tool called GTrends that lets you enter keyphrases and see related searches with search volume and a nice link to Google trend charts.

Its a nice addition to your resources when searching for a new niche, or planning articles for SEO purposes etc

It’s official, Google Analytics comes out of beta and adds a load more features due to user feedback.

According to the official analytics blog, people have been sending requests for new features since it launched. Some of the new features include:

• Clickable URLs. This one is useful because it lets you click a little icon next to a website URL that has referred traffic to you. Always handy to check out the sites that are sending you visitors!
• Hourly Reporting. Many people wanted the ability to be able to see hourly reports instead of just daily. That way you can see which hours of the day the majority of your visitors come in at.
• Cross Segmentation by Network Location. Cross segment reports by network location
• Increased number of data rows per page. Increased from 100 to 500 rows per page. A nice touch this one because I prefer to view more on one page to save clicking the “next page” links

Also a couple of extra search engines have been added so analytics recognises traffic from them.

Overall it’s a nice update making an already good product even better!

I use Google Analytics for all of my websites now, and with the recent update to the user interface it’s an excellent stats package. But, until today I’ve always clicked the shortcut button on my Firefox toolbar that I set up to save me typing it in each time. It was pointing to www.google.com/analytics and it prompted for a login each time, even though I am already logged with my Google account.

I thought nothing of this until today when I read that if you add “/home” to the URL it doesn’t ask you to login each time!

Try it, create a shortcut button or favourite/bookmark to http://www.google.com/analytics/home and it wont ask you to login each time (as long as you are logged in already that is).

If you didn’t know already, Google now owns Feedburner. We can all see the reasons behind this, one being another channel for Google to display ads on, but Feedburner has posted a new message when you login that has got people talking.

Basically, if you don’t want Google to own your Feedburner feed, you have 30 days to opt out and delete your account. This creates a number of problems if you don’t want Google to own your feed. If you delete your FB account, you will effectively delete all your stats and subscribers.

You could however post a message to your feed beforehand telling them that they need to re-subscribe but it could potentially lose you a massive chunk of your subscribers if they simply couldn’t be bothered or miss the post for whatever reason.

I for one have all my feeds with FB but I won’t be worrying too much that Google now own’s them. What about you?

The Ask.com search engine has had a major overhaul over the last couple of days. They have now launched what has been dubbed “Ask 3D”. Looking at the homepage they seem to have gone for a less is more approach with a very minimalist look.

Using the site you get a very “web 2.0″ feel with fading results, hover over screenshots and auto suggest on search results.

A feature that I think is a new one is that they now show sponsored ads at the bottom of the page as well as the top. This makes sense because that’s where you go to move onto the next page of results! Not sure if this was on the old version because I never use Ask to be honest.

What do you think of the new version, like it or hate it?

You’ve probably heard by now that over the next coming weeks, Google will be rolling out an update to its Analytics stats application.

I’ve been using it for a long time now and have to admit that I found it a bit awkward to use. This is a very welcomed upgrade and if you check out the screenshots, I think you’ll agree.

You can read the official analytics blog for more information.