languagevalueWe occasionally see a particularly inspiring integration with Google Analytics. Our latest source of inspiration comes from a product called Pion Lite by Atomic Labs. Pion Lite collects your traffic data and populates your Google Analytics reports -- without using Google Analytics page tags. Atomic Labs offers Pion Lite free to Google Analytics users.

Pion Lite passively "listens" to all of the network traffic between web servers and visitors. This approach reduces the overhead traditionally required to capture visitor data with page tags, and also provides complete data about site visitors including those using mobile devices and RSS readers.



Pion 3.0 includes a new setup wizard that makes it easy for new users to get up and running with Google Analytics by just answering a few questions. Pion talks directly with Google Analytics to populate your reports, offers customizable data capture, real-time data processing and integration, and supports advanced Google Analytics features such as custom variables and events, ecommerce and campaign tracking.
If you're attending SMX on Wednesday, you'll have a chance to learn about Pion Lite in person. Atomic Labs CEO Mike Dickey and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Senior Product Manager, will be giving back-to-back presentations at the SMX Expo starting at 1:20pm on Wednesday, March 3rd.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagevalueWebmaster Level: All
As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.
You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center.
Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.
A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:

We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.
Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date. And if you don't want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.
Posted by Jessica Wong and Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG
[feedback and communication ]
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languagevalueThis week, we'll be hosting two live webinars to help you discover how you can make the most of your AdSense account with a detailed understanding of DFP Small Business and AdSense for search.

The DFP Small Business (formerly Google Ad Manager) webinar will take place on Tuesday, March 2nd. This webinar will cover how you can:

• Use DFP Small Business to sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your direct-sold and network-based ad inventory (including AdSense)
  
• Have AdSense backfill your directly-sold inventory and compete with your other ad networks
  
• Optimize your AdSense placements

The AdSense for search webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 3rd. In this webinar, you'll learn how to:

• Optimize your AdSense for search performance
  
• Improve the relevance of your search results and ads using keywords

We encourage you to post your questions in advance of each webinar on our Google Moderator pages for DFP Small Business or AdSense for search.

Sign up for these webinars here! We look forward to seeing you soon.

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimisation team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Optimization ]
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languagevalueAnalysts often consider an aggregated view of their visitors when assessing reports in Google Analytics. Every visitor is assumed to be of the same type. But, looking at the information in an aggregated form is not nearly as useful as assessing the data for individual audience segments. Different types of visitors - whether new, returning, organic, paid, and so on - behave very differently and have vastly different expectations. The ability to understand what each of them wants, and how to cater to them, is important towards building a successful online presence.
Google Analytics makes it easy to segment your audience with advanced segments. Google Analytics includes a number of predefined advanced segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors, iphone users) that you can take advantage of immediately. More importantly, however, you can create custom advanced segments tailored to your own specific needs.
One of the new Google Analytics features announced in October is the ability to share custom advanced segments with other users across accounts. Using this feature, I'll share links to my favorite custom segments that you can use too. Head over to the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog to learn more and for links to the following segments.
* Bounced visits * Visits that dropped out of the funnel * Brand keyword visits * Brand keyword (organic) visits * Brand keyword (paid) visits * Non-brand keyword visits * Non-brand (organic) visits * Non-brand (paid) visits * Visits from Country X * First-time buy visits * Return visit buys

Read the full article here.
Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagevalueAlready, tens of thousands of AdSense publishers have used Google Ad Planner to share information about their website with advertisers. We are continuing to invest in the product in order to provide the deepest, most accurate data possible. To that end, we have improved how we calculate site traffic by over 10%, upgraded the way we publish opt-in Google Analytics data from publishers, and renamed the product to DoubleClick Ad Planner. Visit the DoubleClick blog to read more about the new product features and new name.

As always, anyone can use the newly renamed DoubleClick Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL for publishers to update their profile remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner/publisher.

If you are new to Ad Planner, we invite you to learn more about claiming your site.

Posted by Wayne Lin - Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[AdSense features ]
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languagevalueAre you ready for a Google Analytics Master class, happening Tuesday, 9 March in Singapore and again on Thursday March 11 in Kuala Lumpur? We bet you are, and we bet, as seekers of data and truth, you ask, what makes it a Master class? And why so far away from Mountain View, CA? Well, you know how proud we are of how global Google Analytics has become. But this is a special class because it's run by the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer team in Southeast Asia, spearheaded by the excellent Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Southeast Asia, who manages the Southeast Asia blog. He's an engineer's engineer, and has organized a great day of sessions, including a keynote by Beth Liebert, Google Analytics product manager here in Mountain View who has helped launch a bunch of great features, including Motion Charts.
There will be a session on Website Optimizer of course, and a full day of talks by both specialists on the Google team both from here in Mountain View and also from Southeast Asia, as well as local partners who have great case studies from the region and techniques anyone can, and should, use.

Take a look at the agenda and register if you're in the area. It will be worth the time.

• Singapore: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/singapore
• Kuala Lumpur: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/malaysia

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagevalue​Within the next two weeks, Google Analytics will be performing a system upgrade. This upgrade is to further increase the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics to meet the demand of an increasing number of enterprises using Google Analytics. Rest assured your website traffic data will be unaffected and there will be no interruption to data collection or processing. All reports will be available and accessible to users. However, for some limited hours, users will not be able to perform administrative account actions such as opening new accounts, creating or modifying profiles, setting up filters and goals, managing user access, etc. The specific system upgrade times will be posted in the Google Analytics administrative interface. If you anticipate a need to make account changes during the next two weeks we encourage you to make them as soon as possible to ensure smooth operations during the system upgrade.
We are proud to see the continued growth in Google Analytics and are committed to delivering the unparalled reliability and scalability that users have come to expect from products running on Google’s globally renowned infrastructure.
P.S. Google Website Optimizer will also be undergoing a system upgrade. All running experiments will continue to run and collect data. However users will be unable to create or modify experiments. Read more on the Website Optimizer blog.
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Announcements ]
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languagevalueTo follow up on our previous post about ad relevance and targeting, let's look at some other reasons why you may experience ad targeting issues on your site.

• Have you blocked the AdSense crawler's access to your pages? The AdSense crawler is an automated program that scans your web pages and tracks content for indexing. Sometimes we don't crawl pages because the AdSense crawler doesn't have access to your pages, in which case we're unable to determine their content and show relevant ads. Here are a few specific instances when our crawler can't access a site:


• If you use a robots.txt file which regulates the crawler access to your page. In this case, you can grant the AdSense crawler access by adding these lines to the top of your robots.txt file:
  
  User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
  Disallow:
  
  
• If the sites you place the ad code on are behind a login, our crawler won´t be able to access your site. To grant access to such pages, please follow these instructions. Also, be sure to regularly check your site diagnostics tool to be aware of any blocked pages.


• Is your site language supported by AdSense? Check to make sure that your site has a substantial amount of text-based content in one of the languages supported by AdSense. When there's enough content, our technology detects the primary language of each of your pages and delivers relevant ads in the appropriate language, even if your site contains multiple supported languages.
  
  
  • The crawlers used by Google AdSense index content by unique URL. As a result, if the URL is the same regardless which language the user chooses to view the pages in, our system will only have the language version it received when indexing this URL. This means that we'll show ads according to the page our system has in its cache, which might not match the language the user is viewing the page in. In order to resolve this, we suggest either of the following:
    
    • Create separate directories for each language, such as http://www.site.com/en/index.html
      
    • Send GET variables (encoded user information appended to the end of the URL after the ? character) in the URL to determine which language should be shown such as for example http://www.site.com/index.php?lang=en
  
  
• Do you see public service announcements (PSAs) on a site which previously showed paid ads before? If your AdSense account requires PIN or phone verification, you'll see a prompt in your account when you sign in. If you fail to verify your PIN or phone number (requirements vary depending on your location), then you may see PSAs on your site. If this is not your case, please visit our Help Center for further information.

If you continue to have ad targeting issues or are unable to see your ads we recommend visiting the ad troubleshooter in our Help Center.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[AdSense features ]
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languagevalueThis is the sixth edition of Web Analytics TV with with a dash of Nick and Nash! In this series you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them! And, here is the list of last weeks questions.
We love hearing from you and thank all the folks who rated last weeks comments.

In this episode we discuss:

• What you can do if you get spammed pageviews in your Analytics Account.
• How to collect ecommerce tracking variables on 3rd party shopping carts.
• Issues with maintaining campaign information with 3rd party shopping carts.
• How do links from competitors show up in your referring sources site?
• How to find Singapore in the Google Analytics map overlay.
• How to see referring URLs in the campaign report.
• How Google Analytics treats conversions from multiple sources in the same visit.
• Why certain referrals like search can have a number of pageviews but 0 visits.
• Computing page influence to conversion and the Google Analytics $Index metric.
• How events effect and sometimes lower the bounce rate.

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

• Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs) whom you can hire to solve problems with Google Analytics implementations.
  
• Tracking transactions in Google Analytics with 3rd party shopping carts.
  
• Tracking across domains with Google Analytics.
  
• Sebastien describes how to see the full referral URL in Google Analytics.
  
• Patrick Altoft describes one way to track first click attribution in Google Analytics.
  
• Link to the Data Export API.

If you found this helpful, we'd love to hear your comments.

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

Thanks!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team
typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Videos ]
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languagevalueYou may have read previous posts on this blog about Google's ad serving platforms for publishers, such as Google Ad Manager. Publisher ad serving helps website owners better manage and deliver ad campaigns that they've sold directly to advertisers. Ad serving platforms are also used to better manage how unsold ads are allocated to third parties, such as the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AdSense and other ad networks. If you do a lot of direct media sales and ad network management today, you may already be using an ad server or have investigated using one. Google offers two ad serving products for publishers - Google Ad Manager, for growing publishers, and DoubleClick's DART for Publishers (DFP), for large media companies with complex needs.

Since Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in March of 2008, we've been working to leverage the combined knowledge of our companies and the combined strengths of our product suite to develop an even more effective solution for ad serving and management. Today we announced the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google, our next generation ad serving platform as well as DFP Small Business, a streamlined version of our new platform designed to meet the needs of growing publishers. The new DFP offers an even more intuitive workflow to help publishers of all sizes manage campaigns quickly and easily, while providing access to sophisticated feature set including advanced reporting, forecasting, and optimization capabilities.

Google Ad Manager publishers will automatically be upgraded to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks and we will be working closely with DoubleClick customers to upgrade them to our premium platform on a schedule that makes sense for their business. New publishers signing up for Google Ad Manager today will be automatically upgraded to DFP Small Business on the same schedule as current GAM publishers. To learn more about both versions of our upgraded ad serving platform you can visit this link.

Posted by Alexander Vogenthaler - Product Manager typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other Google products ]
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languagevalueThis Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Johannesburg - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 11:30pm Saturday
Ho Chi Minh City - 1am Sunday
Brisbane - 4am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagevalueThis week, the US federal General Services Administration (GSA) has approved listing Google Analytics in its apps.gov web site, which is a place for government agencies and services to find approved cloud computing applications. It's goal is to drive innovation and adoption of cloud-based apps in the government, and Google and the GSA have worked together to ensure that Google Analytics is compatible with the needs of US Federal agencies (e.g., Department of Homeland Security, NASA, FCC, and others).
We are very proud of and humbled by this listing and excited by the potential opportunities to serve US federal agencies and help them monitor and improve their website experiences. We understand that working with US Federal agencies includes a responsibility to protect our users and we would like to take this opportunity to further explain how seriously Google Analytics takes data security and protecting data privacy for our users, as detailed in our Terms of Service.
As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Privacy and security are core elements of Google's design and development processes, and we're proud to pass that benefit on to users of Google Analytics. Google's security philosophy is outlined here, and Google's commitment to protecting the information stored on its computer systems is outlined in the Google Code of Conduct.

We're gratified that the US Federal GSA has approved the listing of Google Analytics in its apps.gov site. We will continue to work hard to ensure that we earn this approval in the years ahead.
Posted by Phil Mui, Sr. Product Manager, Google Analytics typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagevalueWe experienced some sound issues when we launched our AdSense Optimization Basics webinar on February 10th. We'd like to apologize to those of you that attended for the inconvenience caused, and let you know that we've rescheduled the event to the same time tomorrow. You can continue to post your questions here and we'll answer as many as possible during the live event.

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Optimization ]
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languagevalueWe'd like to wish you a Happy Valentine's Day from all of us on the AdSense team.

And if you're following the lunar calendar, we'd also like to wish you a Happy Chinese New Year!

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagevalueBack in December, we invited you to submit and vote on product ideas for AdSense. Thanks for participating and voicing your opinions! We received over 600 ideas, and now, we'd like to follow up on what we're doing with them.

We've sorted through and categorized your ideas, which ranged from suggestions such as additional ad format types to new payment methods, and we recently shared them with the Product Management team. Our product managers are now looking into a number of these ideas and are evaluating whether they can be incorporated within our current product roadmap. We're focused on responding to your feedback, but it might take a little time before you see the features we choose to include because product changes require time to build and test across all the accounts and languages we support. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Also, we noticed a few ideas on the Product Ideas page that relate to existing features in AdSense, so we'd like to take a moment to highlight some of them here:

1. You suggested: Show a list of sites displaying ads from a specific publisher ID to prevent malicious activity.
   
   We recommend: Try the Allowed Sites feature to protect your account. You can enter the URLs of sites you own, and earnings from only those sites will be recorded in your account. When you opt in to this feature, we'll also show you a list of URLs that haven't been added to the Allowed Sites list, but where your ad code is appearing. Please keep in mind that if you create additional sites in the future and would like to earn from them, you'll need to add the URLs to the Allowed Sites list in order to be credited for valid activity.
   
   To get started with this feature, visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSenseSetup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center


2. You suggested: Create an index of AdSense sites so AdWords advertisers can easily find sites to target.
   
   We recommend: Try the Publisher Center within Google Ad Planner to provide advertisers with information about your sites. You can claim sites you own, customize their descriptions, and add categories that describe your content. In addition, you can share your Google Analytics data to provide advertisers with insight into your traffic levels. Recently, we added the ability to display a clickable badge on your site that will take interested advertisers directly to your Ad Planner profile. Any publisher can use this feature, but please note that the interface is currently only available in English.
   
   To claim your sites in Ad Planner, follow our instructions and visit our Help Center.


3. You suggested: Enable more flexible Custom Search options.
   
   We recommend: Try the Google AJAX Search API or the new Custom Search Themes feature for additional customization options. These features will allow you to control the branding of the search box and change or enhance the look and feel of your search results to match your site.
   
   For more information on these options, we recommend visiting the Custom Search blog and the Developer's Guide for the Custom Search API.

Thanks again for all of your ideas and votes -- stay tuned to Inside AdSense for the latest news and product updates.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagevalueAs an AdSense partner, you know that Google is continually making improvements to the way we match ads to your content so that users see even more relevant ads, which should help you make more money over time.

A "referral URL" is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.

Let's see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I'm using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.

To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they're part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).

We've recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we're doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user's browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.

This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let's assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.

Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams' continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky - Associate Product Manager typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagevalueWe've just published a new webinar schedule for the next month. In our live webinars, we'll highlight changes you can make to your ad implementation in order to maximize your AdSense revenue. We're also trying something new with our upcoming webinars: we've set up open Google Moderator discussions, where you can raise questions related to the specific webinar topic or vote on questions from other participants. We'll then answer your questions live in the webinar.

To sign up for our webinars, please visit our Help Center. Even if you're not able to attend the live sessions, we'll make sure to upload each webinar recording within 24 hours of the event.

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagevalueFeras Alhlou, president and principal consultant of E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, will be conducting a Google Analytics workshop at SMX West on March 5, called "Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing & Business." Register here and get 10% off with this discount code: GA@SMX

Many organizations, large and small, struggle to go beyond basic web metrics of visitor counts and pageview volumes. In this workshop, senior consultant Feras Alhlou will walk you through what you need in order to drive your online marketing strategy ahead of your competition. I've had the pleasure of sitting in on Feras' workshops in the past, and it was the one of the main reasons we were so proud when E-Nor in the Bay Area joined our Google Analytics Authorized Consultant network. His clear, engaging and energetic teaching style will make the day fly by as you learn. It's time well spent.
Workshop Agenda

Morning Session – Marketer/Business Focus – Strategy & Planning

• Web Analytics Strategy – approach, opportunities and limitations
• How It Works – overview, accuracy and privacy implications, integrating with other data
• Practical – understanding the user interface
• Advanced Features Overview – clever stuff you can do with Google Analytics

Afternoon Session – Webmaster/Technical Focus – Implementation

• Accounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals – structure your data properly
• External Campaign Tracking – measure performance of search, email, banner campaigns
• Reporting – dashboards & insights
• Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports – powerful ways to find insights

The Google Analytics team will also be at SMX West, and we'll blog about that in the near future. Hope to see you there.
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagevalueWe're always looking for ways to improve Google Analytics - not just the product itself, but also the ways in which we provide information about the product. So help us help you - take a minute to fill out this quick survey on our Help Center, and let us know what we can improve!
Posted by the Google Analytics Writing Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagevalueAs you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.

We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.



Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.

Photo courtesy of PIH

You can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.

As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagevalueLast week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting.


If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:

• Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
  
  
• Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
  - audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
  - mp3 files (.mp3)
  - images (.jpeg, .bmp)
  - Macromedia Flash movies
  - Java Applets
  
  To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.
  
  
• Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.

We hope these tips help you resolve any targeting issues you experience with your ads. Next week, we'll take a look at some other reasons why you may see irrelevant ads or PSAs on your site, and how you can best resolve them.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagevalueWebmaster Level: All

Thanks to all of you who took our webmaster quiz and waited patiently to see how well you did! Today, we're pleased to present the Webmaster Quiz answers! We hope this quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. We'll go over a few of the questions and answers here, but if some of the answers lead you to ask more questions, we encourage you to continue the discussion in the forum!

1) You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is:

Correct answer: a) 301 redirect

Explanation: A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, "Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on," as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, "Hey, this is only a temporary redirect--so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?" In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.

2) Your server is going to be moved and unavailable for a day. What should you do?

Correct answer: c) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests

Explanation: Maybe not as commonly known to webmasters, but very useful if your site is down! This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than 503. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.

3) Your website is not in the index five days after you've put it online; what should you do?

Correct answer: b) Continue working on the site

Explanation: This one is a bit tricky. There could be a number of reasons why your site is not indexed. For example, a site's robots.txt file may contain a directive to inadvertently block crawlers from searching its contents. But the main take-away from this question is that if your site is pretty new, it may just be a matter of time before it gets indexed. You should continue to focus on improving your site for your users.

6) You need to remove 192 PDF files from the /private-files/ folder which have gotten indexed. What's the fastest way to do this?

Correct answer: d) Disallow the folder in robots.txt and request removal of the whole folder in Webmaster Tools.

Explanation: Before removing a directory that you don't want indexed, you need to include the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file to tell search bots not to crawl it anymore.

9) You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:

Correct answer: c) None of this is necessary. Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Explanation: Some country-coded domains may overlap with international ones, like .tv--which could also be a site from Tuvalu. But these sort of cases are rare and if they do arise, don't be shy to seek out help on the forum.
Great job to everyone who took the quiz and tested their know-how! And last but certainly not least, kudos to the top scorers! Congratulations on a quiz well done!

40/40:

• ChrisRaimondi
• theopeek
• beussery

39/40:

• Petro
• pornel
• Ian Macfarlane
• g1smd
• Mattman
• thinkpragmatic
• GLV
• GoalGorilla
• rssmarketer

38/40:

• BartVB
• Kim Minh Kaplan
• Ippi
• Erik Dafforn
• scole01
• Konstantin
• John
• fer.vazquez
• eMBe
• Todd Nemet
• p.jaroszynski
• ph0b

Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG
[webmaster quiz ]
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languagevalueThis is the fifth installment in our Web Analytics TV series in which you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

Here is the list of this week's questions. You all are keeping us on our toes!

In this episode we discuss:

• Tracking online conversions and success for small, local, businesses
• Tracking the number of times a visitor converts in one visit
• How the e-commerce conversion rate can be greater than 100%
• How you can change the duration of Google Analytics campaigns
• How you can differentiate between paid and organic search in Google Analytics
• What is the recommended % balance between branded and category terms
• Why is time spent 0 for visits with 1 page/visit
• Why unique visitor numbers are higher than visits
• How visits and unique pageviews are calculated
• Would survey and qualitative help measure "engagement" ?
• How to best track mailto: links on your site
• What are the best practices for using virtual pageviews, event tracking and custom variables?
• How to see dimensions and metrics by location
• Where to find custom variables reports Google Analytics
  
  
  

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

• You can change how long Google Analytics attributes visits to a referral source by using the _setCampaignCookieTimout() javscript tracking method. When you set this to 0, the cookies becomes a session cookie and will be deleted once the user leaves the site. Using this method will make Google Analytics attribute only the first click of a campaign to a visit.
  
• How to link your Google Analytics and AdWords campaigns to differentiate between paid and organic search
  
• Help Center article: How do I link my Google Analytics account to my AdWords account?
  
• Help Center article: What is Autotagging?
  
• Help Center article: How to manually tag your referrals.
• Avinash's Blog: How to Monetize The Value of The Long Tail.
• Avinash's Blog: Calculating Time on Site & Time on Page.
• Caleb's Dimensionator plugin that exposes DMA and other data in your Google Analytics reports.
  

We hope you found episode helpful, and we'd love to hear your comments and have your questions. Please use the comment form below.

In case you missed them, here are our previous videos:

Episode #1
Episode #2
Episode #3
Episode #4

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or 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 another video. We can't wait!

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Videos ]
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languagevalueToday, Google Analytics is available in 6 more languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovak and Vietnamese, bringing the total to 31 languages. It's a large cross-functional effort to localize the product, and we're so proud to welcome these new languages and users!

We also now have over 150 Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs), from every major region (US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific) and over 35 countries! Chances are, there's one near you.

GAACs are our partners; each has been vetted by an internal team here at Google. They are experienced Google Analytics experts (and often, also SEM, SEO and testing specialists) who are available for anything from hourly consultations to training to advanced implementation and analysis.

It's been amazing to see the growth in the analytics industry over the past few years, and as usage and the analytics dialogue scales internationally, our product, team and ecosystem are scaling right along with it.

Posted by Dai Pham and Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagevalue
In December, we announced the phased roll out of Annotations. It's now available in all accounts! Thanks for your patience and enjoy!

Here's a fantastic video on Annotations. You've asked for it for so long, and we hope you'll use it to great effect to better work in concert in your company, using phrases like, "Add it to annotations," or, "It's in annotations." If anything of note happens, log it there. Go tribal with your knowledge.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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