Google SearchWiki: make search your own

Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you're an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it's not there at all and you'd like to add it. Or maybe you'd like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.

Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.

Watch our lead engineer, Amay, demonstrate a few ways to use SearchWiki in this short video:


This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives. We have been testing bits and pieces of SearchWiki for some time through live experiments, and we incorporated much of our learnings into this release. We are constantly striving to improve our users' search experience, and this is yet another step along the way.

AdSense Tips - Joel Comm Live #16

AdSense Strategies - Page Placement and Block Size

AdSense Mistakes

Making money with AdSense is easy, as long as you know how. Watch part 12 of my presentation and learn about the top 10 mistakes that people make when trying to make...

AdSense Reporting in Google Analytics

If you are an AdSense publisher, you can use Google Analytics to see and perform in-depth analysis on your AdSense data. Learn how in this video.

What is your Google Analytics IQ?

In today's economic climate, data-driven marketing and website decision making is increasingly important. If you have solid Google Analytics skills, more than ever, your talents are needed. But, even if you're just starting out learning Google Analytics, we have some good news for you.


Beginning today, we are offering an online course in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools. The course is offered free of charge to everyone who is interested. In addition, we're also offering a test you can take to prove you are qualified in Google Analytics -- the Google Analytics Individual Qualification -- or IQ test.


It costs $50 to take the test. Once you pass, you'll be registered as Google Analytics qualified. You must receive a score of at least 75% to pass, so even if you already consider yourself an expert, be sure to at least review the online course before taking the test.


For more details or to start the course, simply visit ConversionUniversity.com. There's a FAQ with all the details and a link to the Google Analytics IQ test.

Best of luck!

AdWords Conversion Tracking is now even easier

If you use AdWords Conversion Tracking, you may have noticed that the interface for this tool has been redesigned so that it's easier to implement, monitor, and troubleshoot.

(Click to see full size image)

There are now 3 easy-to-use tabs - Conversions, Webpages, and Code - that help you manage your conversion data. Let's take a closer look at each of them:

Conversions: This is where you see information about the conversion actions you're tracking.

• The "Tracking Status" column lets you know whether a conversion action is tracking properly. It shows you if a conversion has ever been recorded, if it has recently stopped recording, or if it's working just fine.
• The "Value" column shows the accumulated value of the conversions you've received based on the value you've assigned to each action.
• The "New Conversion" button allows you to easily create new conversion actions or import them from a linked Google Analytics account. (Note: In order to import Google Analytics goals, you'll first need to follow a few steps.)

(Click to see full size image)

Webpages: Here, you'll see which pages on your site are getting conversions. You can also see a breakdown of the number of conversions per page on your site. This is useful for troubleshooting, as you can make sure conversions are coming from the pages you expect and identify pages that are not reporting conversion activity.

Code: This is where you get the tracking code for each conversion action. You can also change the value of an action, which helps you calculate ROI.

If you're not currently using AdWords Conversion Tracking, now is a great time to start. Conversion Tracking gives you an accurate way to measure the success of your AdWords campaigns. You can learn more about the benefits and how to implement it here.

We hope you enjoy the new interface and happy optimizing!

Post Taken from : http://adwords.blogspot.com/

Simple way to track exit clicks in Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides an easy way to track clicks on links that lead away from your site. Because these links do not lead to a page on your site containing the UTM JavaScript, you will need to tag the link itself. This piece of JavaScript assigns a pageview to any click on a link - the pageview is attributed to the filename you specify.

For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.example.com as a pageview for "/outgoing/example_com" you would add the following attribute to the link's > tag:>

onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/example.com');">

It is a good idea to log all of your outbound links into a logical directory structure as shown in the example. This way, you will be able to easily identify what pages visitors clicked on to leave your site.

To verify that _trackPageviewis being called correctly, you can check your Top Content report 24-48 hours after the updated tracking code has been executed. You should be able to see the assigned pagename in your report.

Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues

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:

Recommendations for Webmaster Friendly freehosts

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 ExplorerBing Webmaster Tools may use similar verification methods; we recommend making sure your users can access each of these suites.
  
  and
• 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?

Supporting FaceBook share and RDFa for Videos

Have 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!

Refer to original post here : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/supporting-facebook-share-and-rdfa-for.html

Tips for News Search

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!

Note : Article taken from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Specifying an image's license using RDFa

We recently introduced a new feature on Google Image Search which allows you to restrict your search results to images that have been tagged for free reuse. As a webmaster, you may be interested in how you can let Google know which licenses your images are released under, so I've prepared a brief video explaining how to do this using RDFa markup.

If you have any questions about how to mark up your images, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Note : Article taken from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

New Tools for Google Servicer for Websites

Earlier this year, we launched Google Services for Websites, a program that helps partners, e.g., web hoster and access providers, offer useful and powerful tools to their customers. By making services, such as Webmaster Tools, Custom Search, Site Search and AdSense, easily accessible via the hoster control panel, hosters can easily enable these services for their webmasters. The tools help website owners understand search performance, improve user retention and monetize their content — in other words, run more effective websites.

Since we launched the program, several hosting platforms have enhanced their offerings by integrating with the appropriate APIs. Webmasters can configure accounts, submit Sitemaps with Webmaster Tools, create Custom Search Boxes for their sites and monetize their content with AdSense, all with a few clicks at their hoster control panel. More partners are in the process of implementing these enhancements.

We've just added new tools to the suite:

• Web Elements allows your customers to enhance their websites with the ease of cut-and-paste. Webmasters can provide maps, real-time news, calendars, presentations, spreadsheets and YouTube videos on their sites. With the Conversation Element, websites can create more engagement with their communities. The Custom Search Element provides inline search over your own site (or others you specify) without having to write any code and various options to customize further.
• Page Speed allows webmasters to measure the performance of their websites. Snappier websites help users find things faster; the recommendations from these latency tools allow hosters and webmasters to optimize website speed. These techniques can help hosters reduce resource use and optimize network bandwidth.
• The Tips for Hosters page offers a set of tips for hosters for creating a richer website hosting platform. Hosters can improve the convenience and accessibility of tools, while at the same time saving platform costs and earning referral fees. Tips include the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics to help webmasters understand their traffic and linguistic tools such as Google Translate to help websites reach a broader audience.

If you're a hoster and would like to participate in the Google Services for Websites program, please apply here. You'll have to integrate with the service APIs before these services can be made available to your customers, so the earlier you start that process, the better.

And if your hosting service doesn't have Google Services for Websites yet, send them to this page. Once they become a partner, you can quickly configure the services you want at your hoster's control panel (without having to come to Google).

As always, we'd love to get feedback on how the program is working for you, and what improvements you'd like to see.

Note : Article taken from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Help test some next-generation infrastructure

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users' queries as quickly as possible.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, so we'd welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.

Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system. We're also interested in higher-level feedback ("These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system") in addition to "This specific site should or shouldn't rank for this query." Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won't have the cycles to send replies.

Here's how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Update on August 11, 2009: [ If you have language or country specific feedback on our new system's search results, we're happy to hear from you. It's a little more difficult to obtain these results from the sandbox URL, though, because you'll need manually alter the query parameters.

You can change these two values appropriately:
hl = language
gl = country code

Examples:
German language in Germany: &hl=de&gl=de
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=de&gl=de&q=alle+meine+entchen

Spanish language in Mexico: &hl=es&gl=mx
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=es&gl=mx&q=de+colores

And please don't forget to add the word "caffeine" in the feedback text box. :) ]

Note : Article taken from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Google Analytics for Flash

Advanced Segments in Google Analytics

Episode 3 Of Bottlenecks To Implementation: Should You Use An Agency?

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.

Note: Source taken from : http://analytics.blogspot.com

Episode 2: Bottlenecks To Implementation For SMBs

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.

New DDD Series: Bottlenecks To Implementation

Last October, Google Analytics introduced a handful of powerful new features that enterprise-class organizations had been asking for. It was a major upgrade that made Google Analytics even more powerful while remaining easy to use and free.

However, no matter what the analytics tool, there are still bottlenecks, often at an organizational level, that can prevent a company from even getting started using any type of web analytics. Nick Mihailovski, our Google Analytics Developer Relations Manager, and Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist at Google, both expert web analytics practitioners, have worked in the trenches, consulted with and had implementation discussions with scores of companies. Each website has different requirements, and each company has a different culture.

In this 3 part series of "Data Driven Discussion" videos, Nick and Avinash spend a few minutes talking about bottlenecks to implementing analytics. This first video is specifically about the obstacles that they see enterprise-class organizations confronting on the way to creating an analytics-driven online presence.

Note: Source taken from : http://analytics.blogspot.com

The Value Of Landing Pages

Imagine 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 Pages

First 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? Ourempanada 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?

Note: Article taken from : http://analytics.blogspot.com

An API Integration To Measure Significant Change

Sophisticated, useful and cool applications are being developed everyday through the openGoogle 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 Trendlywhich 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.

Note: Article taken from : http://analytics.blogspot.com

Back to Basics: Tip for exporting rows

As more and more people use Google Analytics to run reports for their advertising campaigns, we've had to come up with faster and easier ways for people to use Analytics for their everyday needs. One request that comes up quite often is to do away with 500 row export limitation for reports. Understandably, it's annoying to repeat your steps when you're exporting a report that has more than 500 rows.

We've found a helpful workaround that lets you export any number of rows in one go. We've listed the steps below so that you can bookmark this page whenever you need to export all the data listed in your reports.

Instructions

In our example Keyword report, you can see that there are over 3,000 keywords to export. This would mean that we'd have to hit 'Export' over six times!

To avoid the manual labor of exporting and then consolidating all your CSV reports into one, follow the steps below:

1. Go the report that contains the data you want to export.

2. Append "&limit=5000" (or however rows you need) to the URL displayed in your browser URL window, and hit enter to reload the report.

For example:

Before: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/keywords....2311

After : https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/keywords?.................2311&limit=5000

3. After you've clicked 'Enter,' visually confirm that the URL displayed in your browser has the "limit" parameter appended to it. While there won't be any visible difference in the user interface, exporting will now yield more rows.

4. Select the Export tab, and click 'CSV' (not the option that says 'CSV for Excel').

5. The exported data should contain all the rows from your Analytics table.

We hope this added some precious time back to your Monday!

Note: Article taken from : http://analytics.blogspot.com

Using Google Analytics To Identify High-Performing Keywords

The 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 up

Step 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 AdWordsuser 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!

Note: Article taken from : http://analytics.blogspot.com

Software as a Service (SaaS) Overview

Improved Flash Indexing

We've received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we've greatly improved our ability to index Flash.

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file?
We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google's ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

We're already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!

Update: Everyone, thanks for your great questions and feedback. Our focus is to improve search quality for all users, and with better Flash indexing we create more meaningful search results. Listed below, we’ve also answered some of the most prevalent questions. Thanks again!

Flash site in search results before improvements


Flash site after improved indexing, querying [nasa deep impact animation]


Helping us access and index your Flash files

@fintan: We verified with Adobe that the textual content from legacy sites, such as those scripted with AS1 and AS2, can be indexed by our new algorithm.

@andrew, jonny m, erichazann, mike, ledge, stu, rex, blog, dis: For our July 1st launch, we didn't enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We're now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.

@mike: At this time, content loaded dynamically from resource files is not indexed. We’ve noted this feature request from several webmasters -- look for this in a near future update.


Interaction of HTML pages and Flash

@captain cuisine: The text found in Flash files is treated similarly to text found in other files, such as HTML, PDFs, etc. If the Flash file is embedded in HTML (as many of the Flash files we find are), its content is associated with the parent URL and indexed as single entity.

@jeroen: Serving the same content in Flash and an alternate HTML version could cause us to find duplicate content. This won't cause a penalty -- we don’t lower a site in ranking because of duplicate content. Be aware, though, that search results will most likely only show one version, not both.

@All: We’re trying to serve users the most relevant results possible regardless of the file type. This means that standalone Flash, HTML with embedded Flash, HTML only, PDFs, etc., can all have the potential to be returned in search results.


Indexing large Flash files

@dsfdgsg: We’ve heard requests for deep linking (linking to specific content inside file) not just for Flash results, but also for other large documents and presentations. In the case of Flash, the ability to deep link will require additional functionality in Flash with which we integrate.

@All: The majority of the existing Flash files on the web are fine in regard to filesize. It shouldn’t be too much of a concern.


More details about our Flash indexing algorithm

@brian, marcos, bharath: Regarding ActionScript, we’re able to find new links loaded through ActionScript. We explore Flash like a website visitor does, we do not decompile the SWF file. Unless you're making ActionScript visible to users, Google will not expose ActionScript code.

@dlocks: We respect rel="nofollow" wherever we encounter it in HTML.

Note: Post taken from- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/