John Hossack wrote a great post back in April "Tracking Error 404 Pages and Broken Links in Google Analytics: Google Analytics Power User 11". Since then, GA has added one of many new powerful features - Secondary Dimensions.

This week's post is written with thanks to Dave Klein (Public and Media Relations) who posted the following question on John's post: "I've gotten so far as the Navigation Summary. My 404's are appearing in the report but my nav. summary appears blank." which lead to this blog post for the week.

Here's the quick answer, followed by some consequences:

Error pages that will have both 0% Previous Pages and 0% Next Pages are those with 100% Bounce Rates since they are both Entry and Exit pages.

The Navigation Summary will list Next Pages for pages with less Bounce Rates or less than 100% and Previous Pages for those that are not Landing Pages.

What this is costing your site?

Taking things a step further

In the Top Content report, use the secondary dimension column pull-down and select Medium. Then filter the report (use containing: error in the filter at the foot of the table and click Go). The resulting report will look something like this:

Now look at the pages that have 100% Exit Rates, to see where the error caused the visitor to leave the site.

If costly mediums brought those visitors to your site, the errors are costing real dollars. By "costly mediums" I don't only mean AdWords but include Traffic Sources such as organic if your are investing time or money in SEO.

Even more insight can be had applying the same technique to the Top Landing Pages report.

How to Tap Power from Secondary Dimensions

If one is just playing around with Secondary Dimensions and, say, displays the Top Content report and selects a Secondary Dimension, say, Keyword (try it!) one can be excused for thinking the GA team should have spent their time more wisely than wasting it on simply producing much more data. The resulting report is unlikely to provide much value.

For real insight, the trick is to either start with a subset of data (such as the filtered Error pages) and a Secondary Dimension that has fewer values, such as Medium rather than Keywords.

Or, start with a report sorted on the primary dimension and a sparse Secondary Dimension.

Find the higher level insights first and then drill down. At the lower levels choose whatever Secondary Dimension will answer your questions, regardless of how sparse because at that drilling depth, the data will be valuable rather than simply a formidable flood of permutations.

Gossip about how the Other Half Live

By all means - take GA for granted, but here's some juicy gossip. Sorting on dimension columns (as opposed to metrics columns) is not available in some of the most expensive Web Analytics tools out there. And don't even think of asking for Secondary Dimensions from such tools - certainly not in the basic package.

Other Methods of Tracking Error Pages

Dave also referred us to a similar method at http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer;=86927.

The advantages of that method are:

• one has the actual referring page (the one containing the broken link) and the missing page in the reported page name. E.g. "/404.html?page=[pagename.html?queryparameter]&from;=[referrer]"
• if the referring page is external, one has its URL

The disadvantages are:

• one has additional coding to do and
• each permutation of error #, missing/error page (with its parameters) and referring page is listed individually, making it more difficult to pick out the biggest culprits or most expensive errors.

My recommendations:

• at the very least, ensure that the basic tracking is implemented on your error pages, whether they be standard or custom (once they have GA code, they are custom, strictly speaking)
• if you have a significant problem with 404 errors on pages from external sites, use the method at Google Analytics' Support page but limit it to pages referred to by external sources that you are not tracking, like google.com. The code snippet below contains the modification to implement the exception. This removes one of the above disadvantages.
• When viewing the Top Content report with these results, choose Medium as the Secondary Dimension and filter the report on containing: &from=
• That report will list broken pages referred by external web sources.

Post your questions and comments - who knows, maybe you can get your specific question answered in a blog post.

Listed below are posts related to the above topics. E.g. Tip #4.1 below features code snippets to detect the source of a visit on the landing page.

I recently wrote a post on the rule of reciprocation. The principle is simple enough: when someone does us a favor, we feel a strong impulse to give something back.

Today I'd like to examine a few ways in which we can use this principle to increase sales or leads over the holiday season.

Lead Generation

In lead generation sites, we can use the principle of reciprocation to provide additional motivation for leads to engage with us.

For example, write to your most promising leads, letting them know you've made a charitable donation on their behalf. It needn't be a huge donation, so long as it's somehow in keeping with the holiday spirit. Perhaps a small donation of goods to your local food bank, "to allow a less fortunate family to enjoy a Holiday dinner".

Better yet, make a donation to your lead's local food bank. This shows not only have you made a gift, but you've put in some effort (in terms of research) to do so. When your leads see that you've gone to considerable effort on their behalf, they'll feel a stronger obligation to reciprocate.

Naturally, it may not be possible to do this for all your potential leads. But it might be a good way to push a few of your best leads over the edge, to give them that final motivation they needed to engage with you. And even if it doesn't work, you'll have the consolation of knowing you've made a worthy (and tax deductible!) contribution.

eCommerce

In ecommerce sites, it's harder to make donations for your potential customers. There are simply too many of them, and you probably don't even know who most of them are. But there are still ways you can use the principle of reciprocation. For example:

• Offer to make a seasonally-appropriate charitable donation with every sale. Better yet, allow your customer to pick the charity.
• Give select customers a distinct coupon, and position the coupon as a gift. That is, include messaging to the effect that "As a special thanks for your valued business, we're giving you this exclusive gift coupon as a Christmas present."

In any case, bear in mind that the principle generally works better with completed gifts, rather than conditional gifts. (i.e. "We have made a donation on your behalf" generally works better than "We will make a donation if you purchase.")

It’s the same old question. “How do I get more links?”

The answer is that if you want lasting quality links, you need to start by investing the time to improve your website and add great content on a consistent basis. You need to be thinking long-term.

Google’s Algorithm continues to improve and they want to reward websites which are the most relevant and have the best information. Give them what they want and demonstrate that you are the best in the industry. Put the time and effort into generating good content and building a community around it and you will eventually be rewarded. Not only will you start attracting loyal visitors but you will also start attracting the quality links that search engines are looking for.

Give Your Visitors a Reason to Return

Do you sell soap or shoes… or stock tips? It doesn’t matter what you sell as long as you are demonstrating that you have the best site on the subject. Be the source for the latest information on what’s going on with the industry. Build content by using expert opinions, interviews with industry leaders, or user generated reviews. Reach out to the community and give them an area where they can express their own ideas. Create a valuable tool that will benefit your customers. Not only will this content have them checking back in with your site regularly but it will help to acquire the natural links Google is looking for.

It’s not always about the viral article

Of course everyone wants to build one amazing link bait article that goes viral and gains back a thousand links. The fact of the matter is that you can’t expect every piece of content that you put out to go viral. Not every article needs to be a homerun and set Twitter on fire. As long as you’re building articles which add value and show visitors that your site is the place to turn to for quality information. Your customers will appreciate the content and search engines will index it. Continue to build it out and search engines are going to send you long-tailed keyword traffic as a reward.

Don’t give up and be consistent

How many times have we seen websites put great ideas into motion only to have them die out after a couple of months. You must remember that the results of your content efforts can take time. If you’re going to put this into your long-term strategy then you need to have the patients to see it though.

When it comes down to it there are a million different link building strategies and each site may need something slightly different. But I can tell you that if you want to become a leader for the products or services that you sell and you want to acquire top rankings, then the quality of your content needs to be at the core of your strategy. Regularly build content that people find valuable and both the visitors and links will come.

A couple of weeks back Google announced that it was releasing Google Commerce Search for the holiday season. It was released with a bunch of hullabaloo about how 'users only spend 8 seconds searching for what they want before leaving', and how this meant 'leveraging Google's renowned search system to help your customers find what they want when they want it', but what it really introduced was the next step in Google's new effort to brand themselves as a Software-as-a-Service SaaS provider for enterprise level businesses, and their ongoing effort to be the dominant provider of SaaS services.

What it is

Commerce Search is Googles new way to run your ecommerce storefront. Hosted from Googles "cloud" infrastructure, it is:

• Software as a Service
• Cloud based
• Fully integrated with GA
• integrated with Google Checkout
• brags a clean interface, which google insists is crucial to increasing conversion (a claim that I'm not ready to accept as a universal given some of our experiences)

Checking out Google's test store their interface is pretty decent, providing nice sorting options and good search. I also liked that many of my past Google searches returned as auto-completed terms (likely due to the use of the same search field names as Google uses for their search bar, prompting Firefox to autofill. Not some spooky cross domain Google tracking). It's pagination needs some work, and while they seem to have taken note of, and fixed, most of SLI's critiques I still find some of their choices odd. 

For instance: why does the Google Beanbag chair turn up when I search for "bag"? Is this an example of their weighting feature, that gives specific products a higher chance of turning up? Who knows.

How to do it

According to Google its a simple three step process.

Once you've signed up for Google Commerce Search, your site administrator will follow these simple steps.

Step 1: Submit your product data to the Google Merchant Center and Google Product Search. Visit www.google.com/merchants to upload your items via data feeds, direct uploads, or use our API.

Step 2: Customize the look and feel of your on-site search engine. Log into the administrative console to manage product promotions, upload synonym dictionaries, and control parametric search options.

Step 3: Analyze your site's traffic and search effectiveness. View custom reports on top queries, special feature usage and more.

After that your storefront is up hosted from Google's "cloud".

What it means for Google

Google's obviously sees SaaS services as its future, which is going to reshape the nature of Google. Although Google wants everyone to think that this new focus on enterprise level products wont change their relationship with user level services, but if the main profit center for Google becomes enterprise applications I bet there will be some pretty major shifts in their development focus

Not the most exciting week in Vancouver. We're being hammered by wind rain and darkness which seems to have set the city to sleep. Or maybe just me.

This week we have fixes for IE's horrid CSS handling, modeling communication, social sharing of sales, and other alliteration.

• We start the week with Out of My Gord, and how we're all succkers for sales. Specifically it's about the FEED 2009 report which showed that people were far more interested in sending deals around than they were in otherwise interacting with brands, and the role of branding amidst social media age.
• The EU is passing a new law that will require opt-in for third party cookies. Others have said the same, but I'll still hop on the bandwagon and say that this is a very, very bad idea.

• A great one from nettuts today: 9 Most Common IE Bugs and How to Fix Them

• Google announced this weekend that they've implemented campaign tracking variables on feed burner links in order to help you track them in Google Analytics.
• From Omniture, the top 5 mobile implementation "gotcha"s. These are common mistakes people make when trying to quantify mobile visitors.

• From UX Matters, some very cool Visual Methods of Communicating Structure, Relationship, and Flow.
• From User Experience and Design, how to replace form buttons with images. I kidna wonder about this one, since I have to agree with out own Michael Stralker that often you should avoid getting clever with icons, and just say it! Of course, this doesnt preclude using images for search, but I have to wonder sometimes just how well understood a triangle is next to a search box.

• This week Youtube is implementing a skip button in pre-roll ads. This just goes to support the idea that Google is thinking about next generation advertising seriously: only making advertisers pay for ads people watch—and likely using skip data to modify quality score-esque metrics.
• A very fun one from Six Revisions this week: The History of the Internet in a Nutshell.
• More fun stuff: Noupe has a great big list of ugly government websites. I'm always amazed by how ugly these are, especially given that cities within these states often have very nice web pages.

A friend of mine, Mike, is an antique dealer (or a junk dealer, depending on whom you ask). Every time I visit Mike, he amuses me with stories about the weird things customers do and say. Most of these stories deal with pricing issues. For example:

• He once had a gorgeous antique wood stove. Since it took up a lot of room in his shop, he priced it below market value "so it would move faster". Though many customers admired it, nobody bought it. After a few weeks, acting on a hunch, Mike doubled the price. It sold the next day.
• On several occasions, he's essentially been asked, "Don't you have anything more expensive?" In one case, a woman was looking for an antique Tiffany-style lamp. Mike showed her some lamps; one was exactly what she was looking for. She absolutely swooned over it, until she saw the price of $300. Obviously disappointed, she turned to Mike and said, "Oh, I was really looking for something in the $500 range..."

It's easy to laugh at the people in these stories, but you know what? We all do it. We assume that if something is cheap, it can't be any good. And of course, if something is super expensive, it must be wonderful. Why??

It's an adaptive shortcut. Not being willing or able to do a real evaluation, we simply look at the relative prices and assume the more expensive one is better. Of course, it's not always true. But it's generally true, and it's easier than doing a real evaluation.

Even more interesting, is that after making our purchase, we tend to convince ourselves that more expensive items are worth it. Take for example the experiment reported by Dan Ariely*, in which all subjects were given the same prescription pain reliever:

• Of patients told the drug cost 10 cents per pill, 50% reported that it worked
• Of patients told the drug cost $1.50 per pill, 100% reported that it worked

In addition to "High Price Equals Good", there are a number of factors at play in these cases. In future posts, I'll get into more details on things like:

• How Expectations Influence Opinions
• The Placebo Effect
• Cognitive Dissonance

In the meantime, however, bear in mind how pricing can affect your customers' perceptions of the quality of your products. Don't assume that offering a lower price will increase your sales. The decision-making shortcut of "High Price Equals Good" often makes higher priced products more attractive.

*Ariely, Dan (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape our Decisions. Harper Collins, ISBN-10: 006135323X.

The Google Website Optimization seminar in October 2009 featured a t-shirt giveaway depicting "The Anti HiPPO": a hippo head in a universal "NO" symbol. We attended the seminar in order to touch up our GAACiness and WOACness and being that we also have a hippo as a logo, felt that the t-shirt fell into a special kind swag category.

"What is this?" we demanded of Trevor Claiborne, "What are you doing? You're killing our brand here!"

"What? Oh this has nothing to do with you guys," he said, "we're referencing the Highest Paid Person's Opinion. That's why our hippo wears a business suit, while yours wears a tutu."

"…"

Thanks Trevor.

Playing with this theme, and his animation kit, Brian T decided that it was time for cold blue revenge. So alright Trevor, this one's for you.

Video after the link…

For those in the audience not familiar with the Google roster, here's your cast:

Matt Cutts as The Patron
Avinash Kaushik as The Bartender

and the VKI Hippo as the VKI Hippo (not the HiPPO)

Without further ado: (if it doesnt load click here)

Little time, and computer problems are forcing me to get right to the point this week. I am sure you all prefer that anyhow.

This week we've got advice on maximizing your internal linking, 17 hours of javascript tips from the pros, and Eric Peterson on the changing world of analytics.

• We start the week with SEER interactive (or is that Seer? Bloody allcaps) and 7 Ways to Maximize Internal Linking Value.
• Next up SEO Gadget on microformats and how you can use them.

• Am I the only one who doesn't like Smashings new design? Well, regardless here is getting started with content management systems. A useful article for anyone looking to replace their archaic old hard coded HTML pages with something more user friendly.
• Nettuts has outdone themselves in their roundup today, with 17 hours of javascript tips and tricks videos by the likes of Douglas Crockford and John Resig.

• From the Grok (or is that Brian Eisenberg now? God I don't know any more): There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Conversion Rate.
• We haven't cited Eric Peterson in the roundup in quite a while, but this recent post on recent changes in the analytics world, which in turn dove tails into a pretty cool white paper. Check it out.

• A topic close to my heart, UX Booth is talking about the future of interface design. This article looks at the various kinds of new interfacing technologies being developed across a variety of sectors, including military and automobile, and ranging to video games. Pretty awesome.
• Haven't read this one fully yet, as I don't feel a quick skim can do it justice: Moderating with Multiple Personalities: 3 Roles for Facilitating Usability Tests. It starts great though and is definitely going in my "will read" pile.

• Firefox turns five today, and Ars Technica gives a little history on it.
• Usability Post argues that our desktop apps buying process has… poor usability. Do not fear, however, as there are better distribution models.

Ever glazed over staring at web analytics graphs and tables?

Ever asked "Where do I start?"

Ever had to help someone suffering from over glazing?

I'm not known for brevity, but wedging my post between Halloween and Friday 13th, I'm ok being strangely out of character.

The answer is simple. What's The Question?

In any search where the destination is unknown, The Question gives one direction and purpose, curing glazed over eyes.

Before logging in, have your Questions ready - at least your First Question.
Then begin looking at the top level reports.
Then segment.
Then, as the man with the funny accent (Avinash :) says, "drill baby drill".

Its the classic murder mystery, in the category named after The Question "Whodunnit?".

Happy detective work.

Everyone says they don't like web apps because they don't want to have to work through their browser. They don't want to have to be online to use their text editors, and they don't want to have to load every single thing, especially when they're not sure about the quality of the connection they're on.

Well, I tell people, Google Docs can integrate almost seamlessly into your desktop environment, operating with it as if it were a desktop application. All you need is Google Gears. Google Docs Offline mode allows you to take Docs offline, along with all of your files, and then work from your hard drive, with or without an internet connection. Going offline is as easy as clicking "offline", and allowing your files to sync.

You can even place a "Google Docs" icon onto your computer that loads Google Docs (or reader or gmail) in its own window in whatever browser you use. Turn off the navigation bar (Mac Safari: Command-shift-\ | Mac Firefox: hit the upper right hand window button | I'm sure you can do this in windows too) to save some screen real estate and fool the people around you into thinking you're using a desktop based editor.

Then, if you go offline, lose connection, or otherwise are unable to connect to Google, a yellow bar will appear telling you that you've gone offline, and are now saving your content to your hard drive. Returning online is as easy as getting your connection back, and pressing the "save" button, at which point it will sync your local files and online files. A great feature for people who want to use Google Apps like any other desktop program.

click for larger

The real use for this, however, comes in integrating it with the rest of your workflow. For instance, today when writing this blog post I wanted to get away from noise and distraction of the office. I decided to take my netbook and move into a quiet corner. Pre-Docs this would require me to use a thumb drive to move the document from the PC to my latop, then copy it over. Further many of the tools I require (image editing, coding, etc.) are on my work PC, meaning that at some point I will need to transfer files from the netbook to my work PC using a thumb drive, VPN, or some software like Dropbox. To make matters worse, my netbook has MacOS with Pages on it, while my work PC has Windows with MS Word. Compatible, but somewhat strenuously.

Sure, none of this takes any meaningful effort, but with Docs it's not even an effort. In fact, it doesn't interrupt the work process what-so-ever. I can literally leave my netbook in the corner, walk to my PC, look at what I've written, take a screen shot, crop it, shrink it, save it as a thumbnail, embed it into the doc (if I want) and then walk back to my netbook and continue writing.

I write as if using any other word processor. If I am online it mirrors everything to my work PC as I write. If I'm offline it saves to my drive and when I get online I hit save and it syncs right back to my work PC.

click for larger

It's all there, still open as I left it, but now updated with all the work I did off in my quiet corner. No browsing network drives, thumb drives, no configuring network applications to sync through the company firewall, nothing. I just sit down and continue to work.

This will work in the quiet corner of your office, in the coffee shop downstairs (though beware using a public connection while dealing with sensitive files), or even in the park, allowing you to work anywhere, internet connection or not.

Before you can even begin to persuade visitors, you first have to make them trust you. Without trust, visitors won't even enter into a conversation.

There are a number of ways in which you can increase the perceived trustworthiness of your website. Some are pretty obvious, like:

• Look like an ongoing concern: present extensive and current content
• Look like you're not hiding: list a phone number and physical address
• Ensure the level of design polish is appropriate for your industry (i.e. a plumbing site doesn't need to look as refined and perfect as a jewelers' site)

Some "trust markers", however, are not so obvious. One of the most interesting and important, in my opinion, is to "match existing knowledge". It works like this:

• We trust what we already believe to be true
• We look for sources that confirm our beliefs
• If a site matches our beliefs, we trust it more and will stick around

This principle applies universally, but it is especially powerful in niche markets where your products — and by extension your customers — depart somewhat from the "mainstream". Take for example this text from BambooRods.ca, a maker of split cane fly rods: "Why Bamboo?"

"If you just stopped in and already know about bamboo fly rods, what I'm about to say you already know but for those that are attempting to understand the mystery of cane read on...

"First you must answer the question of why you fish. If you fish like I, approaching each pool and run, studying the currents, determining the best cast and lie, presently the fly to where your logic and experience suggests a trout may lurk, bamboo is for you. If you have the time to glance around seeing the marsh marigolds, the hills and wildlife, feeling the breeze, taking the time to just sit on the bank and access your part in the grand scheme of things, bamboo is for you.

"But if you transpose your everyday world into how you fish, casting quickly and rushing off to the next place, measuring each day by how many miles of trout stream you've covered, miles driven or other fishermen seen, perhaps bamboo is not for you.

"Bamboo fly rods are about cadence - the cadence of life itself. Each cast is slower and deliberate, forcing you to slow down and become one with the setting around you. But if your temperament is running and gunning, bamboo isn't for you.

"Some years ago, I was asked to build a bamboo fly rod for a young fellow who just hungered after the next/greatest rod. While I could have built the rod, I told him that he was about 20 years too soon. He had to learn to slow down, become part of the world around him when he fished and then and only then would he appreciate what the bamboo rod was all about. So if today, you think that it's time that your fishing becomes less of a aerobic exercise and more of a contemplative union with nature, bamboo is for you. After all, it is a natural material, one with nature."

Another great example is Rivendell Bicycle Works, a site that sells "old school" lugged steel bicycles and accessories: "The only bikes we love, and therefore the only ones we make and sell, are lugged steel. Steel is the best material for frames because it's strong, tough, safe, repairable, and less likely to need repair. It endures hardships such as accidents and nicks and gouges that kill lesser frames, and although it's not unbreakable, it's less likely to break, and is more easily repaired, than is a frame of any other material.

"Steel frames tend to have slender tubes, which are not only aesthetically pleasing in the same way that a fly rod or a 1910 airplane is, but also are more practical when it comes to fitting tires between them. Because steel is more rigid by volume than are other materials, the tubes don't have to be as fat. And skinny tubes look better and fit tires better.

"The best way to join steel tubes is with lugs. Any other way is a compromise, a concession to price, expediency, or skill. It makes sense to add material to the outside of stressed frame joints, and that's what a lug does. A weld concentrates the stress. A fillet (as in a fillet-brazed frame) acts luglike, and is preferable to a tig-weld, but we prefer lugs for their interesting and beautiful looks. There is beauty of a sort in a tig-weld or a fillet, but there's just not a lot to look at. Yes, a bike is a tool, but tools can be beautiful and functional, and the best ones are both."

Upon reading passages like this, those of us who appreciate lugged steel bikes will barely be able to contain ourselves from jumping up and screaming, "Yes! Finally someone who gets it!" And the more we look around the site, the more we trust it, as the owner eloquently argues more points we believe to be true. (That modern bikes are over-specialized with a misplaced emphasis on racing, that most bike frames are too small, that spandex is silly and wool is best, that indexed shifting is unnecessary...)

The above sites are great examples of "matching existing knowledge". The site owners are clearly passionate about what they do. They have expressed their opinions beautifully. And for those who have a preference for split cane fly rods or lugged steel bicycles, passages like these make us want to engage with the site further.

So know your target audience and how they feel about your products. Better still if you are your target audience: your messaging will sound much more authentic, like the above examples. And your visitors will be ready to be persuaded.

There are, of course, many other markers of trustworthiness. I'll discuss some of these in future posts.

I realized, while researching syncing Google Apps with Outlook, that there are a lot of lesser known—in fact, virtually unknown—features of Google Apps. Most of these are really cool, but not being talked about by Google, which is kind of a shame due to their general usefulness.

Today I'm going to cover some of the lesser known features and benefits of Google Apps that I think are at least as interesting as Google's touted features, if not more so:

Google Docs:

Collaboration:

So you can write documents from anywhere. That's cool. What's better is that two people can work on the same document at the same time, with updates appearing in turn. Further it records every keystroke so if one person deletes the wrong sentence it can always be recalled.

Just share a file with some one, giving them editing privileges, and you'll see their updates pop in as you work.

Public Sharing:

Have a document you want to send to some one, but unsure if they have the correct software to open it? Docs will allow you to upload .txt, .rtf, .doc, .docx, .odt, .sxw, .pdf .ppt, .pps, .csv, .xls, and .ods files, will convert them to Google Doc format, then allow you to share them with a public URL, requiring no login nor Google Doc accounts. Simply hit share, "get a link to share...", and "get a link for anyone", copy the url and save. You can even let the people who visit that link edit the document.

PDF Viewing:

Google integrated this feature into Google search long ago, but few people realize it's in docs. Upload a PDF and Google will analyze its content and reproduce it, allowing it to be opened by anyone even if they do not have Acrobat.

The caveat is that it doesn't reproduce documents accurately, tends to remove gradients, and muddies vectors, so don't expect your graphic heavy PDFs to show up perfectly.

What is cool about this, however, is that you can share PDF's, like other documents, through a public URL that requires no login, so even if people don't have Acrobat they can read your PDFs.

Share Folders:

You've probably seen this pop up in your Google Docs window. You can set up folders to share with people or a group, allowing all files saved within those folders to be available to whoever wants to view/edit them. This saves a lot of the hassle of individually setting the sharing settings for each item.

Go Offline:

Reader was the first to use this feature, but its available in docs too. With Google Gears installed you can take Google Docs offline, allowing you to work on and edit your documents even without an internet connection. Then when you reconnect it will sync back with your online versions.

Google Talk:

Translation:

Everyone knows you can use gTalk to chat, what a lot of people don't know is that you can use it to translate in real time between two languages. Invite a translation bot (or two, in order to translate both ways) and it will take anything you say and translate it into another language.

Calendars:

Show multiple time zones:

Have to schedule meetings across time zones? Under settings select a time interval for "custom views", then just set it to your default view.

Tasks:

Not implemented across the board right now, and only available to domains. Needs to be enabled by your domain administrator, but then it will show up in your Calendar window.

Gmail:

Preview documents:

Another labs plugin, this allows you to show a preview of most attached files in gmail, without the need for you to switch to docs or another program. Again available under settings->labs.

Undo Send:

Yet another labs featurette, this one delays all sends for a few seconds, giving you time to "undo" a send when you accidentally hit the button. Or suddenly regret telling your boss to screw off.

Bonus 11th feature: Go offline:

Like docs, you can take your inbox offline. You'll need to install the offline module available under settings->labs.

We've recently been dealing with a bunch of Google App related questions due to the movement of one of our clients to a Google Apps based operating environment. With us moving over to Google Apps in the near future as well, we figured now would be a good time to start looking at some of the issues people may be having switching over.

Full disclosure: we are an Apps reseller, so it is in our interest to have people switching.

One of the first complaints we heard when switching our aforementioned client to Google Apps was that the employees didn't want that sudden change in their working interface. Transitioning to web based programs can be jarring for some people, both due to a few popular features of desktop clients (one common complaint we heard was the lack of a preview pane in Gmail) and having to go through the process of loading your browser in order to check your mail. Fortunately there are a bunch of solutions for this, including creating shortcuts to Google Apps on your desktop via Chrome and integrating Gmail and other open source clients such as Thunderbird/Firebird, but for the MS Exchange crew—and lets face it, that's a lot of you—Google has provided a tool for syncing Google Apps and Outlook/Exchange.

This allows you to:

• Receive all of your email in outlook (if you want)
• Sync all contacts from outlook into Gmail and vice versa.
• Sync events between Calendar and Outlook.

It also supports the importation of archived folders (archive.pst) and Microsoft Exchange Profiles, so that you don't lose any archived data.

Of course, this is not a perfect solution (Google themselves refer to it as a tool to "ease migration" from Exchange to Google Apps) and currently not supported are tasks, notes, journals, or public folders, which may turn some off of the idea entirely.

Installation is fairly effortless. In Google fashion, it's an installer that walks you through each step in setting up your synced outlook profile. Once loaded the interface is no different than normal outlook, so no real loss there. The big change is that now your email, contacts, and calendar are all available through Gmail, which sure beats having to log into the awful Exchange web access system.

Some Q&A; from Google:

Why would I want to keep Outlook when I switch to Google Apps Premier Edition?
While IT Admins quickly understand the cost savings of using Google Apps, large businesses might opt for a phased approach when rolling Google Apps out to their users since the cost of retraining users can become high. Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook allows IT to immediately save on infrastructure costs, while letting them spread out deployment and training efforts thereby allowing users to adopt Google Apps web interface at their own pace. Can I run a pilot of Google Apps and keep Exchange at the same time?
Yes, Outlook allows you to access multiple accounts at the same time. Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook will automatically set up a Calendar and Contacts account to Google Apps, and help you set up an e-Mail IMAP account as well; however you can still keep your Exchange account active at the same time. This is useful for migrations, account transitions, or even for piloting Google Apps without having to get rid of your Exchange environment immediately.

Bonus question:
Exchange Syncs with my blackberry, can Google Apps?
Yep. Using Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, a software component that is installed on a Blackberry Enterprise Server(BES) for Microsoft Exchange. It connects with Google, authenticates using OAuth and syncs using Gmail Sync, Calendar GData & Contacts GDatanterfaces

Again installation is fairly easy, requiring only that you install it on your BES server, create a profile in the Google Apps Profile Editor, and then do the rest of your set up (add users, set activation passwords, apply policies, etc.) in the BlackBerry manager.

There are some limitations, however. It currently:

• Does not support tasks and notes on BlackBerry devices
• Current calendar only includes one-way synchronization from Google Calendar to your mobile device (and not vice versa). But hey folks, a fix is coming soon.
• You still need exchange server

All in all these are pretty good integration tools for a product that's only been out since July, and while there is room for improvement, it shows that Google is at least trying to help ease the transition from desktop to cloud applications—something that many are now considering an inevitability.

November's here, Halloween is over, and winter is settling in. Soon we'll be in the "black when I get in, black when I go home" stretch. Great for energy levels.

Fortunately our new office is nice and bright.

Last week was packed, so this week we have a packed roundup. We've got Google Analytics Tree visualizations, integrating GA & GWO, and usability best practices. Oddly not a whole lot of technology posts, which was disapointing

• We start the week with a series of three posts, first this post on call tracking by David Mihm, which resulted in this reponse from Bill Dinan, and which Mihm then responded to. The subject is call tracking and SEO, with Mihm arguing that while it's a good idea, it isn't functional, and Dinan arguing for it. A pretty enlightening read.
• Next up, an interview with David Berkowitz of 360i on mobile social marketing.

• Nettuts, remember them? We havent posted anything from there in a while. This week they have dragable elements with persistance using jQuery. A pretty cool idea.

• From the horses mouth, how to create tree map visualizations with the Google Analytics API and App engine.
• And from the horses other mouth integrating Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics in order to do multi-metric conversion testing, etc.
• What on earth does "from the horses mouth" mean anyhow?

• From Forum One, creating usable content. This post goes over some usability best practices, useful for designers or engineers without a user centered design background.
• Same as above, but this time from Smashing, Increasing Online Sales: Simple Usability Problems To Avoid.

• It's official, the web is getting truly globalized. ICANN has approved scripts in urls based on Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and others.
• Canada's at it again! Facebook as changed its privacy policy to fit with the Canadian privacy commissioners demands. First it was modern warfare, now it's internet privacy: Canada, showing that it's not totally irrelevant in the modern world.

The Google Analytics Team announced more High Level capabilities that have been built into Google's Web Analytics solution.

These build on already powerful capabilities like Advanced Segmentation, Event Tracking and Custom Reporting.

A loosely connected but collaborative group of talented, committed volunteers can produce good free software; but a corporation, even one as innovatively structured as Google, cannot build powerful software, continuously upgrade it in material ways and provide it for free indefinitely.

But is 'free' the 4-letter ' f ' word?

For how long can Google continue to provide it for free?

This is certainly a question with which Omniture is paying good money to address. Do you think that GA promoting itself as a free but enterprise solution is getting the ear of enterprise solution vendors?

I maintain that we should no longer consider GA as 'free'. Software developed without an alternate revenue stream but in the hope of donations, is free software. The Alexa Toolbar is not truly free. 'Free' does not only mean free of charge. It also includes free of funding or financial backing.

With the billions of dollars generated by AdWords, Google Analytics and related products like Google Website Optimizer that have proven to be contributing to AdWords' success and growth, payment for GA's advancement will continue to be pumped into GA and its sister products.

So, in reality, even large enterprises demanding the best in enterprise level web analytics solutions, are getting the software they need, paid for by another enterprise and by the masses of small business AdWords clients.

In the case of Google Analytics, 'free' is not the 4-letter ' f ' word. It's just a different funding model. With GA providing the level of enterprise capabilities and worldwide support, the time to think of Google Analytics as free, in both facets of the word, is over.

Scarcity is a great motivator. As things become less available, they become more desirable. There are at least three reasons for this:

1. Social Proof: Others are trying to buy it, so "it must be good".
2. Urgency: If it's scarce, you might not get another chance to buy it.
3. Psychological Reactance: When we're told we can't have something, we want it that much more. (Think of what happens when you tell a child he can't play with a certain toy.)

What's even more interesting, is that if information is perceived as scarce (i.e. it's secret or forbidden information), it seems much more important and trustworthy.

In a fascinating study*, buyers of beef were told that supplies were going to be scarce. They ordered twice as much beef, which isn't surprising.

But when they were told that the information that supplies were going to be scarce came from an exclusive source, they ordered 6 times as much beef!

So to increase sales:

• Position your products as scarce, running out fast.
• Where possible, indicate that information comes from an exclusive source.

*Knishinsky, A. (1982) "The Effects of Scarcity of Material and Exclusivity of Information on Industrial Buyer Perceived Risk in Provoking a Decision." Doctoral Dissertation, Arizona State University.

Halloween is coming soon. It's time for crazy parties and lots of candy. And it's an opportunity for costume retailers to make a lot of money.

Let's take a look at websites that are missing this opportunity.

I believe search term "costume(s)" is the most popular among other Halloween related searches. Google Trends shows decent season spikes in search volume around Halloween. That is why I decided take a look at "costumes.com" to see who owns this juicy name and how this domain name is being used. Or rather, "how this domain name is being wasted".

Domain costumes.com

Despite its incredibly valuable domain name, costumes.com doesn't have its own website. Right away that's a missed opportunity to build a website under this domain and get a strong advantage over competitors. Instead, costumes.com is redirected to www.rubies.com. I don't think it's a good use of valuable domain name. In addition, it's not a nice SEO friendly 301 redirect, but rather an ugly unfollowable JavaScript redirect. Redirecting a valuable domain to a less valuable one is not ideal, but if you're going to do so at least use a permanent (type 301) redirect instead of JavaScript!

Flash Animation

Flash provides some design advantages, but it's not search engine friendly. The search engines have problems spidering and indexing fully flash websites and flash navigation.

Let's take a look at the homepage. The entire page is built in Flash. There is no text content. There is nothing to index. Here is the text-only cached version of this page:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http://www.rubies.com/&hl;=en&strip;=1

As you can see, the only text content is the copyright data!

Title Tags

Title tags are key to communicating your content (and relevance) to search engines, making them crucial to search engine optimization.

Rubies.com has the same title tag "Welcome to Rubie's" on every page. Every single one. Such a valuable and easy thing to do, such an opportunity, and all they use it for is a welcome message.

Website Navigation

Rubie's navigation menu is Flash based. As I noted earlier, search engines have problems following links in Flash and thus have trouble discovering the site's internal pages. In addition to that, there is no HTML or XML sitemap to help the search engines spider and index the website.

The website's menu navigation should be easy spiderable and accessible. That is why a HTML/CSS menu is the best choice. Keywords in internal links could help, too.

Text Content

The entire website has virtually no text content, short product descriptions such as "Plush material" and "Jumpsuit with shoe covers" aside (these do not make a big difference). The homepage (the most important page of the website) has no text at all. This website is desperately in need of text content.

Alt Tags

As we mentioned above the website has problems with title tags and text content. There is another on-page SEO factor that should be improved - alternative image tags. None of their images have descriptions in their alt tags. It is a missed opportunity to rank in Image Search. All images should be updated to include targeted keywords in their alt tag descriptions.

Rubie's Costume Co is the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of Halloween and Carnival products. I totally understand that website www.rubies.com is not e-commerce retailer. But there is an opportunity to rank well for costume related keywords to promote products and brand. As they're not doing this they are missing a prime opportunity to promote themselves and their brand.

I recently received word through the grapevine that Knowem.com has relaunched with the wonderfully dotcommy Knowem2.0. For those of you not familiar with this site (I know I wasn't) Knowem provides "social media identity theft" protection (hopefully not in a "Guido here, he provides… protection" kinda way) by registering you across 300 some odd social media sites. In other words it lets you grab up your company name (or personal/username) on every social network imaginable before any nefarious no-good-nicks do so and start tweeting, grazing, squidooing, kivaing, beboing, virbing, sketching, or thumbslapping (I have no idea what that last one means) as you.

The thing is, registering 150, or 300, or paying $50 a month to be registered on up to 30 more social networks per month seems to completely and utterly miss the point of social media. It's as out of touch as tacking a "2.0" onto the end of your service and…

Oh.

This whole concept—and Knowem isn't alone in this—reeks of that that pre-dotcom understanding of the internet, where your brand needs to be everywhere. Where you need to get as many "eyeballs" as possible looking at you. But social media has always been about precisely the opposite: making personal connctions, and using that to create meaning between your brand and your customers. And that requires a level of exclusivity.

There is no way that you can make meaningful experiences across all of these networks (unless you're Microsoft or something and don't care about the costs, only the "street cred" of being able to make people follow your wine tastes on cork'd.)

Now Kent, I hear you all say, we're not talking about marketing, we're talking about protecting our valuable brand names! We're talking about making sure that those horrible trolls dont hijack our brand and parody us, we're talking about making sure that no silenafil is sold in our name!

Yeah, that's what the rhetoric is saying, but at the heart of it that's not really what this is about. If it were then there would only be the $99 minimal-profile package and that would be that. If this were about protection then they wouldn't be advertising registering your full profile on 150+ sites with 30 more a month. That's not protection, that's OCD.

Hell, even if they did only offer the $99 150-sites-with-minimal-profile service, we're talking about an attitude towards brand control that you just can't do n any meaningful sense any more. If 66% of the touchpoints customers have with brands are produced by customers (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2009) then—lets face it—your brand is no longer in your hands and no number of empty accounts on social media sites are going to fix that.

What you can do is grab positions of opportunity across social networks. Grab a Twitter account, sure. Do it now, in fact. Then maybe register a Facebook fan page. Then if you're a wine company go jump on Cork'd or Snooth, or if you're a musician get on Last.fm. Grab accounts in relevant communities(there aren't that many of them, no where near 100). Then develop a proper social media strategy for those communities. Remember, you're building fans, not gaining eyeballs.

No amount of empty social media accounts will protect your brand from "hijacking", but merely a handful of devoted followers in one carefully chosen community can have a huge effect.

So if you feel you feel the need to get some brand protection then don't go registering hundreds of accounts, camping your name across the multitude of social media sites available. Instead go where you're relevant, go where you're wanted, go where your fans are.

Straight to business this week, we have HuoMah on social search and personalization, click equation on quality score (again), Smashing on CSS and Wordpress, and two in depth looks at Google analytics new features.

• Huomah? At the start of our roundup? Well I never… This week the world was exposed to social search through Google, and Huo Mah takes a look atits potential for personalization.
• Next up Clickequations on quality score, complete with video!

• Two from Smashing this week, starting with the essential characteristics of CSS layouts…
• …and following up with Ten useful wordpress coding techniques.

• At 12 last week Google announced a host of new features for Google Analytics. Avinash Kaushik takes a more detailed look at Insights.
• Epikone, on the other hand, looks at the new GA goals and what they mean for you.

• 90% of everything covers one of my favourite marketing stories, the Betty Crocker instant cake mix fiasco, and how it compares to our attitudes about usability.
• Finally, GetElastic on why we need to stop worrying about the fold, and designing for scrolling.

• The Harvard Business blog asks What is the value of an Outlier? Disappointingly it was not about Malcolm Gladwell's book, which I just finished, but rather about how we're still using the same economic toolbox post collapse like this was just some problem that no one could have prepared for.
• Finally, just to add some humor to the day, Cracked magazine on what the world would be like if the internet vanished tomorrow.

We've always said that "permission" is one of the most crucial aspects of your email marketing campaign. Usually people consider this a "don't be evil" approach: "don't piss off your customers, even if it makes you a buck, capiche?". But the importance of permission goes far beyond "do the right thing", and is actually a really effective tactic for email marketing.

It's no secret that email marketing performs really well. According to ExactTarget "80% of marketers cite email as best performing medium" however email ROI appears to be declining every year (according to the Direct Marketing Association).

"On average, we expect open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates will decline in 2009 as subscribers' in-boxes are flooded with bad email from marketers trying to stay afloat."

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget

Why?

One word:

Spam
(ok, not only spam, but it is a major factor in user unwillingness to open email)

Harris Interactive (2003) found that 79% of Americans declared themselves "somewhat annoyed" to "very annoyed" by unsolicited email, including content that was not typical spam.

What is spam?

Technically, unsolicited bulk commercial email, but what's more important is what your users consider spam. According to an Exact Target study:

• 56% consider a message from a known sender spam if it isn't interesting
• 50% consider messages from known senders that are sent too frequently to be spam
• 48% are using "report spam" buttons for reasons other than to report unsolicited email

Why Permission?

Switching to opt in strategies can have great effects. Some marketers have reported seeing click rates jump from fractions of a percent to 10% or higher. By setting up a permission campaign for our client petwellbeing.com we watched as their sales conversion rate increased 211%!

In 2001 IMT Strategies found that seventy-six percent of consumers would delete an unsolicited email without opening it, but if that email were the result of a permission campaign only 2% deleted it. Forrester found that 40% of people said they opened commercial emails because they recognized the sender as a company they signed up with.

Card communications Q1 2007 report on email trends concluded that:

"Smaller lists lead to higher results in deliverability, open and click-through rates. We've seen this in past reports. Segmentation is crucial to compete in today's crowded inboxes. No surprise here! "

Permission is not just a strategy to assure that you don't spam. It's not a solution based around "karma", it is an effective marketing strategy that is one of the only ways to fight back against public perception that the email you spend is not worth looking at.