Many of you have probably heard of the new service released by Sysomos called FourWhere. We were intrigued ourselves so we asked on of Syomos’ Strategists to give us the low down:As location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla become increasingly popular, there’s a huge amount of value data and content being contributed by users. The challenge is discovering this content in a user-friendly way – not only for users of location-based services but non-users as well…

Today, the Google Analytics blog announced the release of the Google Apps Marketplace, a place dedicated to enhancing Google domains by allowing businesses owners to install apps for their users.

Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity…

This weeks guest was Andy Peatling of the BuddyPress.org Project. BuddyPress is a social networking plugin for WordPress which ads many of the features found on sites like Facebook to WordPress blogs in as few as 10 minutes. We discussed how BuddyPress came about, some of the ways it’s used, some tips on getting started, customizing it and most importantly the features it provides. In news, there were a few nice plugin releases/updates and as always quick update on the WordCamp schedule…

comScore today released January 2010 data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that nearly 173 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Highlights from the report below:

• The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: BrightRoll Video Network with 27.2 percent penetration of online video viewers, SpotXchange Video Ad Network with 19…

Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There’s a natural conflict that creates the issue – the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

1. How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
2. How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you’ll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent…

(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)What do tracking flu, helping consumers monitor their home electricity use, slowing deforestation and perhaps most importantly in 2010, helping the people of Haiti have in common?While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of Google.org over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don’t always get the attention they need and deserve…

Data, data everywhere yet nary an insight in sight.

Is that your web analytics existence?

Don’t feel too bad, you share that plight with most citizens of the Web Analytics universe.

The problem? The absolutely astonishing ease with which you can get access to data!

Not to mention the near limitless potential of that data to be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided to satiate every weird need in the world…

…

Running an e-commerce website is a never-ending task, from trying to squeeze that extra bit of conversion rate out of the check-out page to figuring out which referrers give you the best traffic. There’s also a plethora of tools out there to help you achieve your goals. But which ones do what, and why should you use some of them? This article introduces some of these tools and offers a tip or two on how to use them…

We’re really excited to see how companies can grow their businesses around the Google Analytics API. Today, we’re publishing a case study that illustrates how Shufflepoint, Inc. has used the Google Analytics API to build an innovative product offering which has helped Dolby Laboratories become more productive.ShufflePoint uses the the API to provide enterprise integration tools, and they’ve developed a SQL-like query language for Google Analytics…

We’ve arrived at the year social media takes off. Clearly, social media is already booming, but in 2010, businesses are embracing this new marketing tactic like never before. Twitter and Facebook aren’t just for mindless procrastination anymore. Fortune 500’s are signing up for Twitter handles, budgeting thousands of dollars around year-long social media campaigns. But there is still one very important question to answer: What’s it all worth?

Mainstream Embrace of Twitter

In year’s past, marketing gurus and branding experts touted Twitter as a revolutionary force in communications…

Stay abreast of what your competitors are up to on a weekly basis through regular research. This research should include searching on key terms, checking out your competitor’s ad text, and visiting competitor sites regularly.

Questions you should ask yourself:
Are their ads more compelling? Do they have a sale going on or a new product that is a better version of yours? Does their headline standout more? If you want your company to be able to compete online, regular competitive research is essential…

Stay abreast of what your competitors are up to on a weekly basis through regular research. This research should include searching on key terms, checking out your competitor’s ad text, and visiting competitor sites regularly.

Questions you should ask yourself:
Are their ads more compelling? Do they have a sale going on or a new product that is a better version of yours? Does their headline standout more? If you want your company to be able to compete online, regular competitive research is essential…

Just when I personally hadn’t heard from Omniture for months, they roll out with Marketing Suite 2.0 which includes a multitude of updates and features, check out the details below. Full Press Release Here.

Facebook

• A new solution utilizing Omniture SearchCenter and Omniture SiteCatalyst to buy media on Facebook and measure its influence across digital marketing channels.

New Display Advertising Optimization

• Using Omniture SiteCatalyst customer segment data, advertisers can purchase placements that are shown to just these segments…

In the spirit of the Winter Olympic games that ended last week, I would like to talk about the “winner” of the final A/B experiment we did for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. We already achieved significant improvement with help of previous tests on the checkout process, product details page, and home page. So, shortly before Games time, in collaboration with Wider Funnel, we underwent our fourth A/B experiment on product list page template to take a last stab at conversion optimization…

We occasionally see a particularly inspiring integration with Google Analytics. Our latest source of inspiration comes from a product called Pion Lite by Atomic Labs. Pion Lite collects your traffic data and populates your Google Analytics reports — without using Google Analytics page tags. Atomic Labs offers Pion Lite free to Google Analytics users.Pion Lite passively “listens” to all of the network traffic between web servers and visitors…

Pie charts are evil in the same way that the devil is evil: through mental trickery they beguile you, clouding your judgment while giving you the sense that you are making perfectly rational decisions.  Pie charts obscure the very data story that they are meant to tell.  And that – for visual data representation – [...]…

In her latest post, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise, breaks down where the downstream traffic travels for Facebook vs. Google News. Read the summary below and full post here.

• A larger proportion of Facebook’s News and Media traffic is directed toward Broadcast Media websites compared with Google News.
• The Wall Street Journal last week received 10.37% of its US visits from Google News compared to only 1…

Back in September last year Google announced a new form of rich snippets: those with jump to links in them. They themselves used the example for this trans fat search result:

Now I hadn’t paid too much attention to this new feature until we started testing a new search traffic monitoring tool we’ve built at OrangeValley, and I noticed that 5% of the traffic coming to my WordPress SEO article had such rich “jump to” snippets…

February was a short month, but there was no shortage of great articles popping up around the blogosphere. Blogger’s Digest is Get Elastic’s monthly roundup of can’t miss posts from Linda’s RSS reader.

• Not one, but two of our Elastic Path software developers sent me a link to this fascinating case study by Luke Wroblewski: “Mad Libs” Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%…

JESS3, a creative agency specializing in data visualization, has put together an amazing video which shows the current state of the Internet. We have highlighted some of the data below, but please also watch the video for yourself (it rivals the Social Media Revolution).

• 1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
• 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
• 81% of Emails were Spam
• 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
• 27…

Analysts often consider an aggregated view of their visitors when assessing reports in Google Analytics. Every visitor is assumed to be of the same type. But, looking at the information in an aggregated form is not nearly as useful as assessing the data for individual audience segments. Different types of visitors – whether new, returning, organic, paid, and so on – behave very differently and have vastly different expectations…

This week, we’ve got a couple of newcomers to Whiteboard Studios! Our very own Jen Lopez and Danny Dover (whom you should know well thanks to Jen’s Meet the Mozzers post) are pinch-hitting for our globe-trotting CEO. Let’s all give them a big welcome.

We did a PRO Site Review Webinar last week and noticed a few SEO issues that are all-too-common. So, in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Jen and Danny will walk you through five common areas where people often make mistakes, and explain quick fixes that can help you improve, including bot blocking, courting the Linkerati, identifying problems using Top Pages*, analyzing conversion rate, and addressing canonicalization…

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

Are you ready for a Google Analytics Master class, happening Tuesday, 9 March in Singapore and again on Thursday March 11 in Kuala Lumpur? We bet you are, and we bet, as seekers of data and truth, you ask, what makes it a Master class? And why so far away from Mountain View, CA? Well, you know how proud we are of how global Google Analytics has become. But this is a special class because it’s run by the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer team in Southeast Asia, spearheaded by the excellent Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Southeast Asia, who manages the Southeast Asia blog…

Nick and Avinash are at it again this time entertaining analytics questions from all around the world. This week’s topics include:

• What you can do if you get spammed pageviews in your Analytics Account.
• How to collect ecommerce tracking variables on 3rd party shopping carts.
• Issues with maintaining campaign information with 3rd party shopping carts.
• How do links from competitors show up in your referring sources site?
• How to find Singapore in the Google Analytics map overlay…

​Within the next two weeks, Google Analytics will be performing a system upgrade. This upgrade is to further increase the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics to meet the demand of an increasing number of enterprises using Google Analytics. Rest assured your website traffic data will be unaffected and there will be no interruption to data collection or processing. All reports will be available and accessible to users…

Just how big is Facebook, really?

According to TechCrunch, big enough to encroach on Yahoo’s position of “third largest Web property in the world”, trailing none other than Google (#1) & Microsoft (#2).

In the U.S., Facebook already has the second highest number of unique visitors per month – surpassing Yahoo for the first time in January. Compete.com also reports that of all time spent online in January, 11…

Joost and Frederick talk to Dougal Campbell, one of the original WordPress developers. They discuss various topics: from differences between WordPress and Drupal, and how they handle automatic testing and custom data types (for which WordPress has the upcoming custom post types and the pods plugin), to donations (or lack thereof) for plugins. They go in-depth about microformats and RDFa and how you could use the custom field functionality in WordPress (which Dougal wrote) to make use of those…

Just how big is Facebook, really?

According to TechCrunch, big enough to encroach on Yahoo’s position of “third largest Web property in the world”, trailing none other than Google (#1) & Microsoft (#2).

In the U.S., Facebook already has the second highest number of unique visitors per month – surpassing Yahoo for the first time in January. Compete.com also reports that of all time spent online in January, 11…