SEM News and Free SEO Search Tool Website » Jeff Gillis

Summer Excuses?

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Google Analytics workshops and seminars are happening everywhere this summer! If you’ve had excuses in the past, there’s now no excuse not to take a day of training to become an expert and get a leg up. Chances are there’s one happening near you when you’re available — just take a look at the Google Analytics seminars offered on the Seminars For Success portal. These are one day seminars, either beginner or advanced, where you’ll ramp up into a high proficiency or fine tune your knowledge with fantastic instructors…

A Shout Out About Annotations

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:35:00 +0000

A few months ago at the Google I/O conference, we were approached by Zach Steindler, a co-founder at Olark (a way to gain customer insight and sale better through live chat) who was raving about Google Analytics Annotations. He had such a great business case, we decided to let him rave here. Enjoy, and thanks Zach.Making good business decisions is hard, and making the right one is even harder. At Google I/O I realized many people use Google Analytics but they aren’t familiar with the recent annotations feature that has helped us make smarter business decisions…

Will Using Google Analytics Have A Negative Effect On My Ranking?

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Good news from the horse’s mouth. We don’t mean to call Matt Cutts a horse, but, well, if you know him, you know what we mean. Matt heads the webspam team here at Google and also speaks on behalf of Google answering questions about ranking and results on Google’s search engine. When people have questions about things Google-search-related, Matt is the one who answers.He posts regular video blogs to the Google Webmaster Help channel answering your questions…

Analytics Intelligence Tips: Custom Alerts

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:39:00 +0000

Last week, we shared a video on how to get the most out of your automatic alerts. Now that you’re familiar with automatic alerts, you know that Google Analytics has an intelligence engine that monitors your traffic and posts alerts when it sees something unusual. Now we want to tell you about “custom alerts.” With custom alerts, you can add on to this capability and tell Google Analytics to also watch out for specific things that you know you’re interested in…

Analytics Intelligence Tips: Automatic Alerts

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:23:00 +0000

When was the last time you checked the bounce rate for visits from Hong Kong? You may never have needed to, until an “alert” in your Intelligence reports tells you that the bounce rate from Hong Kong has suddenly doubled.An automatic alert in Intelligence is triggered when the expected performance of a metric, historically, differs from what is happening now. Intelligence monitors the past and current activity of all your metrics and lets you know when something out of the ordinary happens…

Advanced: E-Commerce Roll Up Reporting For Websites With Different Languages

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:48:00 +0000

If you’re a business owner of any size, you’ve at some point considered expanding. And as the web makes the world smaller, one way to expand is to offer your website in different languages and take your business across borders or to different segments. By entering other markets with your website, you can gauge new markets and find ways to grow and generate revenue. Getting set up to offer your products and services in a different country can have a number of steps including localization and legal processes…

New Edition Of A Great Book

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:32:00 +0000

A few years ago, Brian Clifton was working at Google in London, leading our team in Europe. Since then, he’s left to focus on growing his own Google Analytics Certified Partner called GA Experts From Omega Digital Media and written a fantastic book called Advanced Web Metrics With Google Analytics, which has just released a new edition. According to Brian, here’s what’s changed in the new edition:”Since the first edition was published in 2008, a lot has changed – both for Google Analytics and the web as a whole…

Use Case: Twiddy & Company

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:12:00 +0000

We’re excited to hear from users that are able to attribute some incredible growth to Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, and many of the other tools we offer. Today, we’re taking a quick look at Twiddy & Company, which uses Google Analytics on a daily basis to optimize their website. They are one of our best examples of using marketing tools from Google to generate skyrocket growth…

The Power of Multiple Custom Variables, part 2

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:30:00 +0000

This is the second part of a two part deep dive guest post about using Multiple Custom Variables written by Allaedin Ezzedin from E-Nor, a Google Analytics Certified Partner in Northern California.2. Creating Custom Advanced SegmentationEnough coding!! Now is the time to create some custom segments for some deep analysis.In this section, we will set up a simple custom segment for all visitors who used the Spanish version of the site, visited the men’s department, bought an item during their visit, looked at suits and visited the wedding registry section…

The Power of Multiple Custom Variables

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:30:00 +0000

This is the first part of a two part deep dive guest post about using Multiple Custom Variables written by Allaedin Ezzeidin from E-Nor, a Google Analytics Certified Partner in Northern California.This time of year is the perfect time for a deep-dive analysis of your online business. Summer is about to get under way, and the school year and holidays are a ways off. Equipped with the “Google Analytics more Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent” feature set, we are now able to extract insights that weren’t available to us in the past, and go beyond the out-of-the-box reports and segmentations…

Working with AdWords Conversion Products

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:01:00 +0000

Hot on the heels of the launch of the new and improved AdWords reports in Google Analytics, we wanted to let you know about a few upcoming events which will help you take better advantage of conversion tools in AdWords. Tomorrow, July 10, 9am PDT / 12pm EDT: attend a free one hour webinar on AdWords Conversion Products, including Conversion Tracking, Conversion Optimizer and Search Funnels. We’ll do an overview of each feature, and do a walkthrough of the new Search Funnels reports…

A Segmentable Funnel

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:23:00 +0000

Ready for a fun workaround that you can use in Google Analytics if you like? We enjoyed this contribution from a poweruser that anyone can try.Are you familiar with the Funnel Visualization report?It’s a visual representation of your onsite conversion funnel, showing how many visitors go to each step and how many leave the funnel at that step. You can spot trouble points with your funnel and take steps to correct the issue…

New Google Analytics Book Released

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:50:00 +0000

A new book by a stellar team is now available for you to take your usage of Google Analytics to the next level. It’s called Performance Marketing with Google Analytics, by Sebastian Tonkin (former Googler), Caleb Whitmore of Analytics Pros and Justin Cutroni from WebShare (both Google Analytics Certified Partners). Here’s what Sebastian told us about it when we asked him how this book was different from others:Sebastian: “Google Analytics can save you money! Use it to figure out what works with your online marketing, invest in that, and throw out the rest…

Videos From Master Class In Singapore Now Online

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:10:00 +0000

Last month we held 3 successful Google Analytics Master Classes in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney. We were pleasantly surprised by the sheer amount of interest in web analytics in this region with close to 1000 advertisers, agencies, bloggers, developers, and technophiles attending the events. For those of you who made it out, we thank you for your participation and interest, and hope you gained valuable insights from our all star team of speakers…

Updates To Our Homepage

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:51:00 +0000

Take a look at the Google Analytics homepage and you’ll notice some small design and content changes that will improve your experience. Besides some under the hood improvements such as HTML5 and CSS2 validation, here are a few of the changes:

Added dropdowns to the top navigation across the whole site so users can find their way to the content they want better. Try hovering over Product to see a dropdown…

Updates To .NET Library For The Export API

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:33:00 +0000

We’re incredibly proud of the diversity of applications and tools making use of the Google Analytics Export API. We also know that several of the folks developing these tools have been asking about our .NET client library and requesting sample code.So we’re happy to announce we’ve updated the .NET Google Data client library to support all our recent features.In addition, we’ve added 2 reference examples for both the Account Feed and Data Feed which show how to pull advanced segment, custom variable, and goal data from the API…

New Name and New Badges for Authorized Consultants

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 04 May 2010 02:20:00 +0000

Your friendly neighborhood Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program is getting a new costume and superhero name, though their powers will remain the same. (Read: we are renaming the program and with that comes a shiny new logo – we think of our partners as superpowered).Our partners are now called Google Analytics Certified Partners. Here’s the new logo:If you are looking for help with your Google Analytics account, look for companies that display this Google Analytics Certified Partners logo…

Next Week: Two Incredible Conferences In One

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:25:00 +0000

Hey marketers and data heads: heads up! Next week is a good week to tell your boss you’re taking “enrichment time off.” We totally support using this excuse to take afternoons off and go to baseball games, or using it to let your boss know you won’t be at work on a Friday, when you’re actually planning to hit the slopes early for a long ski weekend. “Enrichment time”. But regarding next week, we’re actually talking about legitimate, professional, guilt free, educational enrichment time at two web analytics conferences happening at the same place in San Jose — next week!You’ve heard of eMetrics, a premiere event for marketing and website analytics…

5 years ago today: Google acquired Urchin; Urchin became Google Analytics

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:45:00 +0000

It’s been an amazing journey. Five years ago today, Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation. At the time, we had no idea how popular Google Analytics would become. To a great extent, Google Analytics’ popularity is a reflection of the phenomenal accomplishments and hard work of many talented and passionate people here at Google. But mostly it is you, our customers, who have made the product what it is today…

Web Analytics TV #8 with Avinash and Nick

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:32:00 +0000

This is the 8th edition of Web Analytics TV with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski where you ask questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.Here is the list of last week’s questions. In this episode we discuss:

How to create Advanced Segments for many sites (or other parameters)
AdSense in $index calculations
Tracking affiliates in Google Analytics
Using an Event as a goal like tracking people who watch videos to conversion
Measuring embedded Flash with Google Analytics
Should you use two analytics packages like Google Analytics and Urchin?
Using custom reporting to display landing pages and page titles
Breaking down paid vs organic search by landing page
How site overlay currently works and reasons why it could not work
The difference between unique visitors and absolute unique visitors
How to get the / and /index…