It has been real hard to keep secret for the last weeks where I had those new features and could not share with anyone, and is somewhat “liberating” to finally have the chance to review the new version of Google Analytics being announced today.

Google, as Google, usually do not “announce” new features. What happens is you either find smth in their blog, or you simply log in to your account and you find some nifty new tools and gadgets. This is in their DNA and is part of the magic, at least in my opinion.

Today’s news: Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent

With a bundle of new features, Google Analytics includes more powerful
reporting capabilities, provides greater customization options, and
adds an innovative Intelligence engine to drive smarter data
insights. These capabilities help customers better understand visitor
interaction with their websites and make smarter, more informed
decisions for their businesses.

POWERFUL #1: Google Analytics Goals 2.0

Don’t you just hate it when you need more than 4 goals per profile? No more!
Now you can setup up to 20 goals per profile split to 4 sub-sets of 5.
More over, you are no longer tied to define a goal by a visitor who reached a certain page – If your website is trying to measure engagement, you can define goal for users who reached a certain threshold of pages/visit or time on site!

Powerful #2: Expanded Mobile Reporting:

Google Analytics now tracks mobile applications built for iPhone and Android devices. Mobile app developers can understand how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used. For Android-based applications, engagement can be tied back to ad campaigns. Developers can see which ads drove downloads and then app usage and engagement.

In addition, for customers with a mobile website, Google Analytics can now track traffic to mobile sites from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript. In the coming weeks, site owners building on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX will be able to add a server side code snippet to their mobile websites to enable this tracking.

Powerful #3: Advanced Analysis Features

Google Analytics provides an arsenal of power tools you can use to perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools. Using Secondary Dimensions, you can view multiple levels and combinations of data side by side instead of having to drill down into each level.

Secondary Dimensions are super useful, and enable to drill down data and cross reference it.
In the example above, we are looking at keywords then comparing them with the different geographic locations to find insights on the actual placements and users who arrived at the web site using those keywords.
You can then use the Pivoting feature to cross-tabulate two different metrics with two different dimensions. In the example below trying to match between organic keywords and the correlated search engines:

Advanced Table Filtering allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions and combination. In the example below, I’m trying to exclude those “bad” visits with 90%+ bounce rate and to look only at the quality traffic. You can save, edit and reuse your advanced filters

Unique Visitors as a new metric in Custom Reports: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment in a Custom Report.

Flexible #1: Multiple Custom Variables:

Organizations require flexible analytics tools that can meet their unique reporting needs. With the following features, Google Analytics adds powerful customization capabilities to meet those demands.

We are starting to release Multiple Custom Variables over the next few months. Custom Variables gives power-users the flexibility to customize Google Analytics tracking to collect the unique site data most important to their business. With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into trackable segments.
Multiple custom user segments can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently.
For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section).

Flexible #2: Share Segments and Custom Report Templates

In addition to the ability to create Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, you now have greater control over administering and sharing your customizations. Simply share the URL link for a custom report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into their account. You can also select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.

INTELLIGENT – The Tip of the Iceberg!

Well, first time I saw Intelligence reports, I had this funny smile all day long. Sometimes, you see that no matter how smart and sophisticated you think you can be, no matter how deep you will analyze, dig in the piles of raw data and reports – there will be a day when you will wake up and a click of a button will give it all to you at once. Google Analytics intelligence is one of those things.

Highly Intelligent #1: Automatic Analytics Intelligence:

New “Intelligence” reports provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your
site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods.
It is a part of the initial release of an algorithmic driven intelligence engine.

For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday. Instead of having to monitor reports and mine through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business.

Highly Intelligent #2: Custom Analytics Intelligence:

Custom Alerts: Customers can create custom alerts to tell Google Analytics what to watch out for. They can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions and metrics, and be notified by email or in the user interface when the changes occur.

To summarize this post – Google has done it again, they are presenting features and capabilities previously available only with super expensive and complex software suites, enabling web marketers and analysts of all sizes to enjoy the beauty of the web – the ability to measure, quantify, analyze and IMPROVE each and every single action.

For more information:

Google Analytics Channel @ YouTube

Google Analytics Official Announcement

E-Nor Review of the new features

Review @ Search Engine Land

(and if this post wasn’t clear enough – I simply love it!)

hitwise

Google is gaining market share, says Hitwise. According to Hitwise’s latest report, Google receives 71% market share of searches, while Yahoo! receives 18.26%, MSN (Live) receives 5.32%, Ask.com receives 3.45% and the remaining 46 other engines accounted for 1.95% all together.

Search Engines Market Share US 08 2008

The change vs. July 2008 is not significant, however comparing to August 2007, it is very clear that Google is growing and taking market share from rivals Yahoo! and MSN (LIVE).

Search Engines Market Share

While the Yahoo! search engine market share decrease is “only” ~5 points compared to last year from the total searches, these points represent a 20% decrease from the share Yahoo! had last year. With MSN (LIVE) it’s even more extreme – the ~1 point the lost which may seem insignificant in the general scope, represents 17% of their market share last year – lost.

Search Engines Market Share US 08 2007

Mmm… So what does this all mean to us?

First, it’s kinda interesting for us as marketers to get insights and understand the trends of the industry we’re part of But seriously, this tool can help greatly to plan the media budgets for the upcoming year.

If (and the “if” is critical) our performance on all 3 media outlets (Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter) is similar in its KPI indicators (conversion rates, cost of clicks, value of traffic, cost per action etc.), the classic action would be to divide our budget evenly between them, pro rata to their market share as follows

According the this market share data and table, for each USD 1,000 spent on Microsoft adCenter, we’d invest USD 3,432 on Yahoo! Search Marketing and USD 13,347 on Google AdWords in order to keep our advertising budget spread inline with the users behavior.

BUT

and it’s a big BUT!

This ALL CHANGES if our KPI’s as explained above are changing. Once MSN adCenter can provide better conversion rate, better cost per action than any of the others, we will need to “milk it” to the fullest extent and take advantage of the inventory they have to offer, on account of the underperforming media outlets.

Here’s the presentation I gave on the Meetup breakfast with Jeff Pulver on August 28th 2008 in Tel Aviv:

The presentation is embed below and the session itself is available on YouTube:

Part I
Part II
Part III

Cheers
OC

Google Chrome launched less than a day ago, and this has been one of the busiest days on my twitter, email and all in all web life.
I do not recall the last time the web was so obsessed with a launch of a beta product, so much conversations, expectations, opinions, buzz, hype, and web content spread in such a way.

I read the comic, read some opinions and downloaded Google Chrome last night. Indeed, it’s a neat cool fast and kinda stable browser, especially if you take into account it’s only in Beta.

But that’s not what Chrome is all about!

Google Chrome Link bait

Chrome is probably the best most successful piece of link bait campaign I saw, IMO, this is a real state of the art well planned online and offline PR move, which amazingly enough moved our entire industry the last 24 hours!!!

After all, and if we take the PR pitch and hype back to their real natural size and power, it’s a browser. It’s not an operating system (still running on windows last time I checked) and at best it will take a nice chunk of market share from Explorer and Firefox and make this life of adapting a website to browsers a bit more complicated.

But the linkbait… man this is fantastic.
So creative – going with the comics creative to make it stand out and tell us “hey, this one is not just a launch, it’s special!”
So well planned – After the “leak” to the blogosphere the media world i.e. newspapers, TV networks and of course the web got the news and everyone starting talking
The Differentiated Pitch: s it a browser? Is it an Operating system? Will it affect Microsoft? What about Firefox and their relationship?

And the results:

• 7,850,000 Search results for “google chrome”
• 8,117 news items on google news
• 73,902 blog results on Google blog search
• 1,380 videos on Google video
• ~2,000 mentions on twitter

In a matter of hours I received dozens of emails from friends, facebook messages, IM links, twitter messages, phone calls and an ongoing discussion in our office – simply and utterly beautiful!

So for sum?

Chapeau to Google’s PR team, Chapeau to the developers for a job well done on the browser and a special chapeau to this guy who offers to sell a chrome email address on eBay !!! (Thanks Olivier)

Google Insights for Search has launched today. Well, Google dudes did it again. Taking data based on the Google Trends product, and giving it the twist marketers really need, Google just launched a very interesting service called Google Insights for Search.

We’ve seen similar services from Compete, Quantcast and Hitwise, however Google’s way of presenting the data, connecting it to the keyword research world combined with the marketing segmentation by vertical, location and related searches, really brings more light into keywords research.

Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search is not the typical keyword research tool. It will not give you hundreds of thousands of new keyword phrases, will not give exact search volume (yet) but it will give you great insight as to trends, related searches, demographics and competitive rank for a term vs. its industry index.

So what is Google Insights for Search?

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames

The information is then segmented by:

Categories: Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports.
Seasonality: Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly.
Geographic distribution: Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.

In the following example you can see how the term “hotels in new york” can be seen differently if we’re looking at the whole world vs. only USA:

You can see that the trend is opposite between the two geographic segments! While in the whole world, the term used is now decreasing vs. the selected vertical, in USA it’s actually above the industry!

From the little I can see after playing with this tool, I can definitely say that Google Insights for Search delivers the promise its name hold. It provides insights for search

Enjoy…
Ophir

Hey, I’m back after a few silent weeks…

I found the recent survey from TIM – TNS – Teleseker. It seems in February 2008 most Israeli web sites suffered a fall. Ynet fell ~5 points from 62.6% to 57.4%; MSN Israel fell 2 points from 31.7% to 29.8%; Tapuz fell 4 points from 31.2% to 27.1%.

Nevertheless, the global web sites such as Google, YouTube & Facebook maintaned stability and even slightly improved their numbers.

Here’s the list compared to previous months:

Well, it’s seldom when I can write about two new revelations in one week, and be exited with both. But I guess this is one of those weeks…

I just received an email from SEOmoz, followed but reading Rand Fishkin’s Blog Post announcing the re-launch of their premium service as “SEOmoz PRO” (nothing new, seems more like “hype”) service – however, and here comes the cherry – a completely renovated interface, AJAX / Web 2.0 extra cool and interactive interface!

So You would now be thinking:
“So ophir, Are you really that excited about the interface you’re wasting HTML tags and blog space writing about it?”

Then I’d answer:“No! This one is really new! and here comes. (but you must admit their interface is indeed cool… )”

ok…SEO Analytics is a toolset developed by SEOmoz, and handed to the premium – pro subscribers ($49/month, worth every penny).
What it does, is it collects very useful information from the web, about the web site of your choice, analyzes and presents the data in a way which may help you:A. Understand how your website is indexedB. Learn about how search engines read links pointing at your web siteC. Measure your brand exposure on the webD. Analyze, Compare and track all of these over time

Why is SEO Analytics so important?

Well, when we do SEO, we strive to gather the information and be able to analyze and deduce conclusions. As in most cases we do not gather the data in a professional, steady, methodological way (at least most SEO’s) but rather sample the data here and there, most conclusions are based on trial & error, probability and luck.
SEO Analytics brings methodology into the SEO equation. For beginners, it will teach you what to measure and how to measure, for PRO’s, it will teach us how to look at the data more professionally.
SEO Analytics has got the potential to become the WPG (web position gold – remember?) of the SEO 2.0 days.

Make no mistakes!

SEO Analytics will NOT do SEO. it does not optimize your web site, it does not bring in new links, it does not improve your search engine rankings nor traffic!What it does, is it reports and gives you data you can and need to work with.And a word for consultants:WPG and its rivals got to a point where they are not useless at most times. Again, this is mainly due to misuse of the tools and the presumption that they do the work for you (hint: They don’t…)SEO Analytics is the same. You need to get the most out of it and use it carefully as a KPI measurement tool, as high indexed pages number does not guarantee rank or traffic.SEO Analytics is a WONDERFUL tool to demonstrate the SEO work to clients. Again, don’t get mixed with positions but fir the client who does not know SEO, the nifty graphs and charts can really help visually demonstrate your hard work.

What else can I say? Enjoy!

Read on:

SEO Analytics

Rand Fishkin’s Blog Post on SEO Analytics

I read a new research summary from eMarketer this weekend. The summary analyzed three interesting researches on the interesting subject of User Generated Video and the demographic segmentation of its use.

The three article examined the demographic patterns of user generated video consumption, trying to identify segments which tend to use and consume this type of media more than others.

While these articles provided a world of graphs, charts and precentages of all kinds (I’ll review most below) I’d like to focus on a few figures which I found quite interesting:

1. Online Video Content Categories

An average of 30% would watch TV episodes online and 28% would watch full length movies vs. 14% for news Videos and only 8% Amateur or User Generated Videos.

2. Gender Profile for User Generated Video

While on traditional internet use stats, we are used to see a 55%-45% split between male and female, the articles showed 20% male vs. only 11% female who actively visited user generated video sharing web sites, and 63% male vs. 51% female video viewers in general.

I, for one, didn’t see this one coming. If anyone cares to explain why male are more dominant in this niche – I’ll be happy to hear!

3. Age Profle for User Generated Video

Well this is no surprise – but for 18-29 years old 30% visit User Generated Video sharing websites, vs. 14% of the 30-49 years old segment, 7% of the 50-64 years old and only 4% of the 65+ segment. I guess user generated video is not yet the domain of the “silver surfers” – a segment I’m going to review in details in the coming weeks.

Important: this refers only to user generated video. The numbers for general online video consumption are much higher: for 18-29 years old 76% , 57% of the 30-49 years old segment, 46% of the 50-64 years old and only 39% of the 65+ segment.

The inspiration for this post was published on eMarketer and based on researches by: Accustream , Harris Interactive and the “Annual Gadgets Survey 2007” by Pew Internet & American Life Project.

A survey conducted on December 2007 by TNS Teleseker – “TIM Survey”, in Israel, shows 4 million Intenret users in Israel. This number shows a slight growth of 2% vs. the results from December 2006, and mainly reflects the growth of overall population in Israel.

A few interesting Internet usage statistics in Israel:

• 73% of Israeli households are connected to the internet.
• 96% of the users enjoy broadband Intenet access.
• The gender split is 54% male, 46% female.
• The segment of 50+ years old users count for 23% of the users (vs. 11% of the users 7 years ago!)
• 39% of Israeli web users are signed for at least one social network

So what do these web usage statistics mean?

1. The growth of the internet usage is slowing down, as the share of users from the entire population is getting close to saturation.
2. The penetration of broadband access is amazingly high, and supports the usage of rich media and video in their various formats in marketing activities (in the past this used to be an obstacle)
3. I personally like the segment of 50+ years old. This segment has time, most of them has spare money, and we see more and more users in this segment spending money online and using the Internet for purposes of personal banking, shopping, paying the bills and many other activities other than just reading the news.