languagevalueYou may remember that last year, we added arrows to the bottom of cost-per-click (CPC) ad units. These arrows allow users to browse through additional relevant ads, helping them find exactly they're looking for.

We've been testing slight updates to the look of these arrows, and our experiments have shown improvements in the user experience. As a result, we'll soon be making a few minor aesthetic changes, including darkening the arrows to make them more visible and orienting all arrows to point left and right. In addition, to help users understand what the arrows do, hovering over the arrows will soon show the labels 'previous ads' and 'next ads'. You'll see these changes appear in CPC ad units in all languages gradually over the next few days.

Posted by Amy Wu - AdSense Product Manager typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[AdSense features ]
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Last week, in our Google Analytics API video series, Jacob Matthews discussed What is the Google Analytics API? In this new video, Jacobs goes deeper and describes the three steps developers need to take to retrieve data from Google Analytics: Authentication, Account Query, and Profile/Report Query.
Feeling inspired? Play with our interactive javascript examples to see the API in action.
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

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languagetypetext/htmlvalueWith tools like Street View, Google Maps is altering the way people interact with their surroundings, letting you see the facade of the store you're about to visit, plot directions, and find a place to park before you even leave the house. Google Maps has also changed the way information is being presented across the web. Since 2005, web developers from around the world have begun to overlay their content on Google Maps, mashing it all up and presenting it in extremely creative ways.

As this trend evolves, maps are becoming the backdrop or canvas for many webpages. We've been hearing from the over 150,000 Google Maps developers eager to monetize this growing screen real estate, so we've worked to ensure that Google Maps embedded on external websites can be properly monetized. If you're a Maps developer, you now have two options for your embedded Google Maps API implementations to earn revenue using AdSense.

Maps Ad Unit - This new Google Maps API feature overlays AdSense ads on an embedded Google map on your site. The ads are targeted to the map's current view and update as the user moves around the map. For example, if the user is looking at Napa Valley, California, the text ads will likely display ads for wineries, hotels, and/or restaurants. As the user moves the map, ads continue to change by location and you'll generate revenue from every valid ad click.

To see an example of this, take a look at ZipMaps, an external Maps API site that presents U.S. zip code boundaries:



GoogleBar Local Search - The GoogleBar feature within the Google Maps API overlays a search box onto your map which lets the user perform a local search on the map. When results are shown, an ad is displayed that you earn revenue on when clicked. Feedback from sites that have implemented the GoogleBar reveals that users are happy to be able to search Google while on their map, and the site owners are happy to be able to monetize this additional service.

Here's an example of the GoogleBar in action on another Google Maps API site called Google Sightseeing:



If you're a developer with an existing Google Maps API implementation and an AdSense account, take a few minutes to add it to your maps to see how it performs for you. Interested in embedding Google Maps on your site? Take a look at the new Google Maps site to learn about all your options!

Posted by Mike Pegg - Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other Google products ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueDid you know that you can save clicks and jump directly to a deep-level report from your dashboard? Let's say that you want to see which cities in California you get traffic from. Ordinarily, you'd need to click Visitors, then Map Overlay in the report navigation. Then, you'd need to click United States, then California. But, you can save 3 of these 4 clicks by simply adding this report to your dashboard.
Try it now. Go to one of your favorite reports that requires several clicks to access. Once you've arrived at the report you want --and at the level you want it -- click Add to Dashboard. (The Add to Dashboard button is at the top of your report on the left, next to the Export and Email buttons.)

You'll now see the report on your dashboard. The next time you log in to your Analytics account, you'll be able to see the top cities from California on your dashboard and jump right to the report with a single click.


Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Back to Basics Series ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueRecently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn't use) the "keywords" meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob's site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?
At least for Google's web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that's an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present.
Q: Why doesn't Google use the keywords meta tag?A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.
Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?A: It's possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it's unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.
Posted by Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG

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languagetypetext/htmlvalueWe are excited to be releasing new features -- features that have been prioritized based on feedback from you.

Event Tracking

Get Excited! Event Tracking, our number-one feature request, is available through the API. You can use event tracking to measure the number of user interactions with a website. For example, you can track:

• the total number of times a white paper is downloaded
• the length of time it takes to load a video
• the number of validation errors users get when filling out a form

If you already have an integration with Google Analytics, Event Tracking is even more exciting. To illustrate, let's look at Sprout. Sprout's integration with Google Analytics helps customers track user interaction within their Sprout content. However, users currently must log into the Sprout interface to see billing and account management data, and then also log into Google Analytics to see how their own sprouts are performing. Now that event tracking is available through the API, companies like Sprout can pull the interaction metrics tracked by Google Analytics events and present them directly in clients' performance dashboards--effectively leveraging Google Analytics as a platform to power their analysis reports.

Ready to try out Event Tracking yourself? Check out the event tracking API docs, or fire up the Query Explorer tool.

Navigational data

The Google Analytics web interface provides a navigation report. Analysts use it to infer which links visitors click on, from one particular page to the next. Now that this data is available through the API, you can create new visualizations, such as custom site overlays, to see which links get the most clicks.

Increased filter length

The length of filter expressions has been increased to 128 characters. This enables developers to perform more complex queries with fewer requests to the API, saving bandwidth and quota.

There is a detailed list of all these changes in our public change log. We hope you find these features useful to your development and look forward to your comments and continued feedback. If you haven't done so already, please join our public Google group and let us know how you've been using the API.


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

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languagetypetext/htmlvalueWe recently announced that AdSense would start allowing Google-certified ad networks to bid for your display ad space in order to help you find new ways to generate revenue. You may have seen today's post by Neal Mohan on the Official Google Blog announcing the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and we'd like to take a moment to let you know how these two announcements fit together.

The Google-certified ad network capability is powered by the DoubleClick Ad Exchange that we announced today. Certified ad networks are Ad Exchange participants who have gone through an additional certification process in order to be able to to bid for your ad space through AdSense. We call this feature "yield management", because it offers you the most revenue for each ad that shows on your site in real time, regardless of whether it's Google or another certified party who can offer you the highest bid.

You don't need to change any of your account settings to start allowing these ads to compete. Also, you can continue to use the Ad Review Center to control which certified ad networks can appear on your site.

Opening AdSense to certified Ad Exchange participants means that more advertisers will be able to bid on your ad space. We believe this will ultimately help you earn more revenue for your sites.

Posted by Sean Harvey, Business Product Manager, and Scott Spencer, Group Product Manager basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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I spent a day in Irvine, California interviewing some of the software engineers who built the Google Analytics API, starting with Jacob Matthews, the tech lead behind the API. If you haven't read any of our API documentation yet but you have been wondering what the Google Analytics API is all about, we put together a couple of videos where we hear about the API from the people who built it. Here is the first one where we keep it high level and ask Jacob, "What is the Google Analytics API?"
Enjoy!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Analytics API ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueIf you've ever argued over where the pavlova was first invented and are currently enjoying the first signs of spring, the Australia and New Zealand AdSense team is holding a webinar specifically for you! We'll be presenting our techniques for improving your AdSense for content performance, as well as handy tips on making your AdSense implementation more user-friendly.

We'll be running two free sessions that you can choose between; both are exactly the same and will run for approximately one hour. Register for the one you'd like to attend by visiting one of the links below -- even if you're not located in Australia or New Zealand, you're still welcome to register!

• Webinar Option 1: 12.00pm AEST Monday 21st of September 2009 (GMT +10:00)
  
• Webinar Option 2: 5.30pm AEST Tuesday 22nd of September 2009 (GMT +10:00)
  

Once you've registered, you'll receive an email from messenger@webex.com to confirm your time and give you instructions on how to attend the webinar. We recommend that you register in advance.

If you're new to webinars (or web seminars), they're online meetings that you can attend using any computer with an internet connection and speakers or a headset. This Help Center entry will provide further details about what you'll need to participate. You'll also have the chance to ask questions based on the presentation through the interactive chat panel. Here are a few more details about next week's webinars.

• Presenters:
  
• Victoria, Mel, and Disha from the Sydney-based AdSense Team
  
• Content:
  
• Introduction - The Google Australia & New Zealand AdSense Team
  
• Google AdSense – AdSense for content optimisation
  
• Ad Formats – Opting in to image and text
  
• Placement – Position and size
  
• Design – Colours and borders
  
• Google Custom Search Engine - Best practices
  
• Working with Google - AdSense account essentials
  
• We'll also be showcasing some real-life examples of how other publishers have optimised their AdSense implementation.
  

We hope you can make one of the sessions, and we look forward to sharing our best AdSense optimisation techniques with you.

Posted by Mel-Ann Chan - AdSense Optimisation Team, Australia & New Zealand basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[International Optimization ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueThe Google Webmaster Central blog in Spanish has launched a Site Clinic especially for the Spanish-speaking market. We're offering to analyze a series of websites in order to share some best practices with our community using real web sites. The plan is to offer constructive advice on accessibility and improvements that can lead to better visibility in Google's search results.
During this month, we will be receiving submissions from any legitimate website, but it must be primarily in Spanish. So before you submit your site, please visit the original post and if you want to participate fill out the form as soon as possible, because we will only be selecting 3-5 websites from the first 200 submitted for this Site Clinic, so don't miss out!

Posted by Esperanza, Search Quality Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG
[feedback and communication ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueWebmaster Level: All

Last month, I gave a talk at the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference on Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues. For those who couldn't make it to the conference or would like a recap, we've reproduced the talk on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. Below you can see the short video reproduced from the content at SES:



You can view the slides here:



Posted by Greg Grothaus, Search Quality Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG

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languagetypetext/htmlvalueLooking for ways to spice up your website with dynamic content? You may know from our optimization tips that you can help increase your AdSense revenue by incorporating other Google products into your site. We're happy to introduce a new, easy way for you to do just that with Google Web Elements.

Web Elements let you easily add richness and interactivity to your site simply by copying and pasting a snippet of code. Inspired by the convenience of embeddable YouTube videos, each Web Element is built upon existing Google products. For example, the Google News element, introduced on this blog earlier this year, dynamically pulls in content from Google News based on news topics you select and displays within an embed on your site. With the official launch of Web Elements, you can choose to include Web Elements from products like Google Custom Search, Calendar, Docs, Friend Connect, and more.

Need more inspiration on how to integrate Web Elements into your site? Here are a few ideas:

• If you're using a Custom Search Engine on your site, the Custom Search element can help you integrate search results much more seamlessly with the look and feel of your pages. You can continue to earn revenues from searches while offering a better user experience to your users with better results styling.
  
  Who's using it: The Mayo Clinic uses the Custom Search Element as their main search function. The look and feel of the search results blends in smoothly with the rest of the site.
  
  
  
• To enable your visitors to post comments and links on your site, use the Conversation element. The element also lets visitors participate in conversations via Friend Connect.
  
  Who's using it: St. Simons Blog uses the Conversation element to let users in St. Simons Island and Georgia's Golden Isles connect with each other.
  
  
  
• The YouTube News element displays the latest YouTube videos from a number of news content partners including the Associated Press, CBS Online, Washington Post, Bloomberg, NY Times, Russia Today, Al-Jazeera English, and more.
  
  Who's using it: CitizenTube is YouTube's official news and politics blog. They display the YouTube News element on the right-hand side of the homepage labeled as "Latest News Videos".
  
  
  
• The Spreadsheet element allows you to display a table of information to your users which pulls from any Google Spreadsheet you choose. Whenever you update the Spreadsheet, the element will also update automatically. This is an easy way to keep dynamic content on your site fresh.
  
  Who's using it: Metal Italia is an Italian heavy metal fan site. The site uses the Spreadsheet element to display album information for heavy metal artists.
  
  
  

To get started, all you need to do is go to http://www.google.com/webelements, select the element you want on your site, and copy and paste the resulting code into your website source code. If you're interested in tinkering further with the Web Elements, you can further customize any of the elements as you please, since they're all powered by Google's developer APIs.

Using a Web Element on your site (or two, or seven)? We'd love to hear what you think and how they've been working for you. Just leave a comment on this blog post!

Posted by Christine Tsai - Google Web Elements Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other Google products ]
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Most of the recommendations we've made in the past are for individual webmasters running their own websites. We thought we'd offer up some best practices for websites that allow users to create their own websites or host users' data, like Blogger or Google Sites. This class of websites is often referred to as freehosts, although these recommendations apply to certain "non-free" providers as well.

• Make sure your users can verify their website in website management suites such as Google's Webmaster Tools.
  
  Webmaster Tools provides your users with detailed reports about their website's visibility in Google. Before we can grant your users access, we need to verify that they own their particular websites. Verifying ownership of a site in Webmaster Tools can be done using a custom HTML file, a meta tag, or seamless integration in your system via Google Services for Websites. Other website management suites such as Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools may use similar verification methods; we recommend making sure your users can access each of these suites.
  
  
• Choose a unique directory or hostname for each user.
  
  Webmaster Tools verifies websites based on a single URL, but assumes that users should be able to see data for all URLs 'beneath' this URL in the site URL hierarchy.  See our article on verifying subdomains and subdirectories for more information.  Beyond Webmaster Tools, many automated systems on the web--such as search engines or aggregators--expect websites to be structured in this way, and by doing so you'll be making it easier for those systems to find and organize your content.
  
  
• Set useful and descriptive page titles.
  
  Let users set their own titles, or automatically set the pages on your users' websites to be descriptive of the content on that page.  For example, all of the user page titles should not be "Blogger: Create your free blog".  Similarly, if a user's website has more than one page with different content, they should not all have the same title: "User XYZ's Homepage".
  
  
• Allow the addition of tags to a page.
  
  Certain meta tags are reasonably useful for search engines and users may want to control them.  These include tags with the name attribute of "robots", "description", "googlebot", "slurp", or "msnbot". Click on the specific name attributes to learn more about what these tags do.
  
  
• Allow your users to use third-party analytics packages such as Google Analytics.
  
  Google Analytics is free enterprise-class analytics software that can run on a website by just adding a snippet of JavaScript to the page.  If you don't want to allow users to add arbitrary JavaScript for security reasons, the Google Analytics code only changes by one simple ID.  If your let your users tell you their Google Analytics ID, you can set up the rest for them. Users get more value out of your service if they can understand their traffic better. For example, see Weebly's support page on adding Google Analytics. We recommend considering similar methods you can use for enabling access to other third-party applications.
  

• Help your users move around.
  
  Tastes change.  Someone on your service might want to change their account name or even move to another site altogether.  Help them by allowing them to access their own data and by letting them tell search engines when they move part or all of their site via the use of 301 redirect destinations. Similarly, if users want to remove a page/site instead of moving it, please return a 404 HTTP response code so that search engines will know that the page/site is no longer around.  This allows users to use the urgent URL removal tool (if necessary), and makes sure that these pages drop out of search results as soon as possible.
  
  
• Help search engines find the good content from your users.
  
  Search engines continue to crawl more and more of the web.  Help our crawlers find the best content across your site. Allow us to crawl users' content, including media like user-uploaded images.  Help us find users' content using XML Sitemaps.  Help us to steer clear of duplicate versions of the same content so we can find more of the good stuff your users are creating by creating only one URL for each piece of content when possible, and by specifying your canonical URLs when not.  If you're hosting blogs, create RSS feeds that we can discover in Google Blog Search.  If your site is down or showing errors, please return 5xx response codes.  This helps us avoid indexing lots of "We'll be right back" pages by letting crawlers know that the content is temporarily unavailable.
  
  

Can you think of any other best practices that you would recommend for sites that host users' data or pages?

Posted by Greg Grothaus, Staff Software Engineer, Search Quality Team

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languagetypetext/htmlvalueHave you ever wondered how to increase the chances of your videos appearing in Google's results? Over the last year, the Video Search team has been working hard to improve our index of video on the Web. Today, we're beginning the first in a series of posts to explain some best practices for sites hosting video content.
We previously talked about the importance of submitting a Video Sitemap or mRSS feed to Google and following Google's webmaster guidelines. However, we wanted to offer webmasters an additional tool, so today we're taking a page from the rich snippets playbook and announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa. Both of these markup formats allow you to specify information essential to video indexing, such as a video's title and description, within the HTML of a video page. While we've become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we'd certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters. Also, to maximize the chances that we find the markup on your video pages, you should make sure it appears in the HTML without the execution of JavaScript or Flash.
So, check out Facebook Share and RDFa and help Google find your videos!

Facebook Share:
<meta name="title" content="Baroo? - cute puppies" />
<meta name="description" content="The cutest canine head tilts on the Internet!" />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" />
<link rel="video_src" href="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"/>
<meta name="video_height" content="296" />
<meta name="video_width" content="512" />
<meta name="video_type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />RDFa (Yahoo! SearchMonkey):
<object width="512" height="296" rel="media:video"
resource="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"
xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
<param name="movie" value="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" />
<embed src="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512" height="296"></embed>
<a rel="media:thumbnail" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" />
<a rel="dc:license" href="http://example.com/terms_of_service.html" />
<span property="dc:description" content="Cute Overload defines Baroo? as: Dogspeak for 'Whut the...?'
Frequently accompanied by the Canine Tilt and/or wrinkled brow for enhanced effect." />
<span property="media:title" content="Baroo? - cute puppies" />
<span property="media:width" content="512" />
<span property="media:height" content="296" />
<span property="media:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
<span property="media:region" content="us" />
<span property="media:region" content="uk" />
<span property="media:duration" content="63" />
</object>
Posted by Michael Cohen, Product Manager, Video Search Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG
[crawling and indexing ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueThe topic of using Google Analytics to optimize your PPC keyword buys never gets old. We have posted about it here a bunch. It's putting your PPC money where your analytics mouth is, uh, for lack of a better metaphor and is one of the core reasons to use web analytics. Recently, a Google blog called Solutions for Southeast Asia wrote a post about this topic, covering the techniques to use Google Analytics and AdWords to find and add the most effective unused keywords. It's a great post - definitive and very thorough, going from soup to nuts, expanding on these steps:
Step 1: Ensure Goals and E-commerce Tracking are set upStep 2: Access the Keywords Report
Step 3: Export non-paid keywords to a spreadsheet
Step 4: Expand the list of keywords using other Google products
Step 5: Download a list of keywords that you are already advertising on
Step 6: Identify keywords you are not advertising on
Step 7: Expand on these keywords and start advertising

For explicit directions on each of these steps, take a read of the article. You and your website will benefit. Of special note - step 4, which we've pasted in below. As you can see, Vinoaj, the author, gives you an extensive list of Google products that can help you refine or expand your keyword list. Some of them you've probably never even heard about, but will simply take your targeting to the new levels, especially when budgets are tight but you want to grow your business as Q4 approaches.

To consider more keyword options, consider using some of Google's other free products to discover more opportunities: Google Insights for Search, Google Trends, Site Search reportsin Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and even the new Wonder Wheel. If you are an AdWords user take a look at the Keyword Tool, Search-based Keyword Tool, Search Query Performance reports, and more. Once you have identified additional keywords you would like to advertise on, add it to your list of keywords from Step 3.

Happy analyzing!

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

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languagetypetext/htmlvalueThis 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:

Ottawa - 1pm Saturday
London - 6pm Saturday
Kolkata - 10:30pm Saturday
Manila - 1am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday

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

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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Here is the final episode of our three part series on bottlenecks that companies face implementing web analytics. In this episode, we ask the question, "Should you use an agency, or can you do everything (implementation and analysis) in house?"

Bottom line: you need big brains.

And if you decide to go with one of our authorized consultants, you can find one near you. They are analytics do-everything agencies which often double as SEMs, SEOs, and Website Optimizers so you get the full circle of support for almost everything you do online - including strategic recommendations on improving your web presence and marketing.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Videos ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueAs part of our continued efforts to give you more control over the ads that appear on your sites, we'd like to share two additional improvements to the Competitive Ad Filter:
Faster filtering
In the past, the Competitive Ad Filter sometimes took up to several hours to block URLs you'd entered. Knowing you've wanted a faster filtering system, we're excited to let you know that URLs added to your Competitive Ad Filter are now usually blocked within 30 minutes. We hope that this will help you quickly make changes to maintain a positive user experience on your sites.

Increased filter list size
At the same time, a growing number of you have let us know that you're running out of space in your Competitive Ad Filter. Now, you can add up to 500 sites to your filter list, more than double the previous limit. As you add new sites, please continue to keep the possible revenue impact of filtering in mind. You might also find it helpful to review our tips for using your Competitive Ad Filter.
We're continuing to work towards enhancing your ad controls, and we'd love to hear any suggestions you have. Feel free to leave us a comment below.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[AdSense features ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueWe're happy to announce that publishers located in South Korea can now receive payments via Western Union Quick Cash. You won't need to wait for your checks in the mail, and AdSense won't charge you any fees to use this payment method. Please note that payments can only be picked up at the International Bank of Korea (IBK) and are only available in South Korean Won (KRW) currency.

Sign up for payments by Western Union today by following these instructions. Two important things to remember: we can only send Western Union payments to individual publishers at this time, and the payee name on your account must exactly match the government issued ID card that you'll bring to pick up your payments. We also encourage you to review the information in our Help Center for more details about this payment method, including how you can pick up your payments and when you'll need to pick them up by.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[International Payments ]
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The first episode in the three part "Data Driven Discussion" series about bottlenecks to implementation focused on large, enterprise-class companies. In this episode, we ask our experts Nick and Avinash the question, "What obstacles does a small-to-medium sized business face in implementing analytics?"
SMBs are often more nimble than large businesses but resource-constrained with everyone working overtime. A lot is at stake. In this environment, analytics can have a huge impact, answering questions and giving guidance through data to back up major decisions.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Videos ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueWebmaster Level: All

During my stint on the "How Google Works Tour: Seattle", I heard plenty of questions regarding News Search from esteemed members of the press, such as The Stranger, The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly. After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News Search.



Along with the FAQs about News Sitemaps and PageRank in the video above, here's additional Q&A to get you started:

Would adding a city name to my paper—for example, changing our name from "The Times" to "The San Francisco Bay Area Times"—help me target my local audience in News Search?No, this won't help News rankings. We extract geography and location information from the article itself (see video). Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings.What happens if I accidentally include URLs in my News Sitemap that are older than 72 hours?We want only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl. To get the full scoop, check out the video!

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
Filmed by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team
basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG
[sitemaps search results ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueAn ad serving issue yesterday, August 31st, from 4:30pm PDT to September 1st, 2am PDT caused less relevant ads or public service announcements (PSAs) to appear on some publisher pages. This was mostly limited to regions of Asia. Our engineers have now resolved the issue, and ad targeting has returned to normal. We apologize for the inconvenience, and are working to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueImagine that we're launching a brand new advertising campaign for our new e-commerce website that sells Empanadas, my favorite food. The structure of the website is simple. We have a homepage, a few category pages that lists empanadas by type (baked, fried, etc), and hundreds of individual pages for each type of empanada (ham and cheese, steak, chicken, veggie, etc.).

Website structure

(click to enlarge)

Given this site design and our goal to sell as many empanadas as possible, let's look at this question:
Which type of landing page (home, category, or product) leads people to purchase more empanadas?
To answer it, we'll use two Google Analytics features, Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, to find out exactly, in dollars, which is the best type of page. And to perform this analysis we need one of two things: 1. e-commerce or 2. goals with a goal value.
Searching for the answer in Landing PagesFirst go to the Content > Landing Pages.

(click to enlarge)

This report is naturally a good place to start but it only gives us three metrics: Entrances, Bounces and Bounce Rate. I want to know dollar amount, not bounce rate. To get the value of each landing page we have to create a custom report.

Step 1) Create the Custom Report
Go to Custom Reporting and create the following report:
Dimension: Landing Page
Metrics: Entrances, Abandonment Rate, Goal Completed and Value per visitor

(click to enlarge)
Great. Now I know the average value for any visitor that starts on these pages. On average the value per landing pages is $0.07. This means for all people who arrive at my webpage, on average each person will buy $0.07 worth of empanadas. Not much huh? However, as you can see some pages have a consistently much better conversion rate than others. For example, my home page -- /home.html -- gives me a per visit value of $0.10. I'd like to compare that with my other two page types: product and categories. We could go through this list and pick out one by one which is better, or write a regular expression in the search filter box, but an easier and more flexible way to identify these page is via Advanced Segments.

Step 2) Create the Advanced Segment
Take a minute to think about the layout of your website. Is there a unique identifier that let's you segment your landing page types? If there isn't then ask your Webmaster what you can do to get around this problem. In our example, remember that our website is very simple. Every empanada page contains the word empanada.html, every category page contains category.html, and the home page is home.html. To begin with, let's create a category segment.

Create the "Category" Advanced Segment
1. Go to Advanced Segments>Create New.
2. Dimension: Landing Page
3. Contains "category.html"
4. Name it "Visits that land on Category."
5. Save and Apply to report
Ouch! Visitors that land on my category pages spend an average of $0.04. Much worse than the average of $0.07. Now let's compare with what happens when a user lands on a page of an individual empanada product page. It's the same process as above except we use Landing Page Contains "empanada.html."
Create the "Empanada" Advanced Segment
1. Go to Advanced Segments>Create New.
2. Dimension: Landing Page
3. Contains "empanada.html"
4. Name it "Visits that land on empanada."5. Save and Apply to report
Here is what we get:

(click to enlarge)

Wow! Visits that see a product page before anything else spend $0.30 on average. That's over 7 times more than the value of the category landing pages. Which pages should we use? Our empanada pages of course! We no longer have to guess which page is best. Even if we have hundreds of different types of empanadas we can calculate to the penny the potential value of focusing our advertisements on products.

Yeah, that's nice but how do I do the same for my website?

The above is a great example of full circle analytics. Set up goals, then create the reports and segments you best need to analyze the success of the goals. We chose to look at Landing Pages, but after you have goals, reports and segments in place, you can do most analyses.
Here are the key takeaways:

1. Most importantly your URLs must have a unique identifier (like our ?type=empanadas) so you can segment by page type AND either e-commerce implementation or a goal value.

2. Instead of thinking home, category, and product think home, broad, or specific. Usually, the more specific and focused the landing pages the better.

3. If you don't use an e-commerce website don't worry, you can do the same analysis. For e-commerce websites its much easier for us to calculate exact dollar return -- but! we can also use goal value to calculate user value. So, if you don't sell a product, your goal might be to have the users fill out a contact form. If for every 100 users that fill the form you can gain 5 leads that over a month spend an average of $100 each then the value of your form is 5x$100=$500/100=$50 per form completed. This goal value can also be used to calculate landing page value.

Now that you know exactly how to use Google Analytics to identify the value of your landing pages it's time to apply the lessons to your website. How much money do your landing pages bring you?


Posted by Gabriel Francis, Google Analytics Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Business Insights ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalue

Welcome to my brand new “cool stuff” section of this blog where I will write about, yes you guessed it, cool stuff made by other people. It may be hardware, software, books, who knows, but today I am going to start out with a program that will be a perfect fit for existing users of my website webmaster tools: CSE HTML Validator.

Already back in late nineties this was the best website validation tool to use when checking websites for errors. Now, much later, it still continues to improve, year after year, surpassing all other tools of its kind. People using alternatives such as the W3C HTML and CSS online validators owe it to themselves to try this combined HTML/CSS and accessibility validator.

Are you only working on personal or educational websites? Then you may be interested in their free html validator. While not offering nearly as many functions as the standard and professional versions, it will still complement W3C validators and give more tips and warnings about website issues.

Note: While our general purpose website analysis tool supports HTML and CSS validation using W3C online validators, this process is slow and does not cover the same amount of areas CSE HTML Validator does. However, CSE HTML Validator comes with an API which means we will investigate if we in a future version of our software can integrate with this validation engine as well!

basehttp://www.microsystools.com/blogs/feed/
[Uncategorized ]
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languagetypetext/htmlvalueSophisticated, useful and cool applications are being developed everyday through the open Google Analytics API. We're loving what we're seeing. Basically, developers are grabbing their data from Google Analytics and slicing and dicing it, mixing it and mashing it with other data and applications, creating dashboards and widgets, and innovating some of the coolest stuff a data driven person could hope for. For example, we're really impressed with an app called Trendly which makes it easier to find important movers and shakers among your data via an innovative new interface, cutting down on the time you need to monitor your profiles. The team who built Trendly is using it as their one stop Google Analytics dashboard. We asked the team to share how this application came about, and here's what they wrote:
How many of you can afford to pay someone to monitor your analytics full time? We can't. We're a small startup, and we just don't have the resources to make that happen.

We use Google Analytics to track visits to our website, www.dabbledb.com. We'd love to have someone watching the hundreds of keywords, referrers, and campaigns that drive traffic to our site, someone who would send us a quick email whenever something really interesting happened: "Hey guys, thought you'd like to know that your average visitors from 'online database' doubled last week, and it's staying there - guess that SEO is working!"
So, using the Google Analytics API, we created Trendly, a monitoring and visualization tool which you can look at anytime and easily see what's changed. In short, Trendly uses mathematical models to take noisy data like this:

and figure out when significant changes have happened, marking it like this:

According to Trendly, our average daily visitors from the search words "online database" went up from 18 to 32 in mid-January, and then up again to 50 in early February. Also, Trendly sends us periodic emails to let us know about changes like these, saving us a lot of time. It also prepares a news feed with attractive charts that put the changes into perspective relative to everything else that's going on. Take a look at this - it calls out significant changes and makes them easy to notice with a timeline on the right.


When we first built Trendly for our internal use, we cobbled it together by screen-scraping and downloading exports from Google Analytics. But part of what made this tool exciting to us is that it solves a pretty universal problem. Trendly is your analyst until you can afford to hire a full time analyst. Heck, it probably keeps a clearer log of important changes than an analyst would! And with Trendly, you can delay this much longer since it cuts down your worflow by hours per week.

The new GA Data API allowed us to share it! With no signup and a couple of clicks, anyone can authenticate with Google and authorize us to grab their data and generate the reports. Suddenly our internal tool became a new product offering which can help any Google Analytics user. Give it a try and see for yourself.

What the guys at DabbleDB built is amazing. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.


Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team basehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA
[Analytics API ]
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