The official launch for the big change is at SES NYC on March 24, however, those who are interested can sign up for the new adwords beta and have a play with the new system, switching between the old a new interface at will.

The new interface incorporates a number of updates including:

• New 'account tree' style navigation
• In-Line editing of keywords, bids & ad placements
• Integrated reports on campaign management pages
• Roll-up views of all keywords, ads & placements in a campaign
• Ability to filter data faster
• Performance summary graphs to help pick trends faster

A little bit of research suggests that the new interface has already been tested by our English counterparts late in 2008. Have any of you had a play yet? If so what are your initial thoughts?

Not yet to take up Twitter on my phone, I am a FireFox user and managed to come across a great app, it's called TwitterFox. This app sits in the status bar of the browser and allows you to easily view everyone's latest updates, as well as make updates of your own.

Since installing the app I am much more frequent on Twitter and find it a much more powerful social networking site. It is now obvious to me it is not Twitter itself that makes it so popular, but the many ways in which you can use it.

It will be interesting to see this technology evolve as so far Video Infusion seem to be main player offering more then just songs and movies. I feel it will not be long before Youtube too enables the purchase of not just songs but any products. My guess is Google Checkout will somehow be involved.

To give you an idea of how the technology works, have a quick view of the below video, courtesy of Video Infusion.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has seen this technology used anywhere else.

Now in any economic downturn there are usually businesses who actually benefit, fast food outlets such as McDonalds are a good example as people look to save money by eating cheap takeaway. Like McDonalds I think that many Australian and International online businesses will actually benefit as well, as people look to save cash by buying from online retail stores who have less overheads and are usually much cheaper opposed to your local bricks and morter retailer.

According to Hitwise, traffic to the Appliances and Electronics sector in Australia grew by 27.2% comparing December 2007 to December 2008, showing a massive increase in the span of just one year. It was also very interesting to note that the major driver for this traffic increase was paid search, many online businesses made big investments in paid search which goes to show a lot about the quality of this traffic.

I believe there is a major opportunity ahead for online business in Australia, and I predict the online shopping market will continue to hold strong in 2009 and into 2010, as many other big Australian retailers such as Harvey Norman continue to struggle.

Bill is surfing the net one Saturday and visits a online shoe store from whom he has bought shoes from before. Naturally, like many shopping carts it requires registration in order to purchase something, and because Bill has shopped here before he already has an account with them. Bill then decides on which shoes he would like to purchase next, and proceeds to the checkout. On arriving at the checkout, the site asks him to either log into his already created account (which he has) or create a new account, so he chooses to log into his previous account and enters his details, only problem being he has forgot his password. Now again like most shopping carts, there is a password reminder feature that will email his password to him, but there is one more issue, where Bill is currently he does not have access to his registered email address, and cannot get the password reminder.

As you can see Bill has just been stopped in his tracks from ordering his next pair of shoes, simply because he forgot his password. Now I am not saying that all shopping carts that employ mandatory registration work exactly like this, however the majority do, and even if your cart does have a way around this issue, in my mind it is still a bad idea.

When designing a eCommerce website or any website in fact, you need to ask your self important questions like what is the point or purpose? In any eCommerce store I am assuming the primary purpose is to make sales. So once you have this in mind you then go about building the store in order to make it as easy as possible for people to complete your goal, which in this case is make sales. Once the user has decided to trust you and make a purchase, making them sign up for an account is only giving them one more reason to leave your website and not make the sale.

Now I am not saying that account registrations are bad, all I am saying is that forcing the user to register is bad, and will hurt your conversion rate. If you feel that allowing a user to register in order to have their account details saved for a next purchase is a good idea (and in many cases it is) then by all means do that, however make it optional. You can promote the account registration in many ways including the checkout process to remind users of the facility, but don't force them.

I noticed that when pulling ecommerce reports for some time periods, the data was way off. Sometimes it would be real accurate, say within 95% - however other times it would be at 50% which didn't make sense at all to me. I spent some time trying to figure out where and what was going wrong, and then found something. One day I pulled a transaction for report for a couple of days in the past, and noticed that numerous transactions were being recorded with a $0 total, while some of the other transactions had the correct total but had a quantity of 0 which again made no sense what so ever. No wonder some of my reports were so off.

With some help we eventually figured out what it was - some sort of time delay issue. These transactions that had bogus values auto corrected themselves days later, most of them anyway. There still was the odd transaction that didn't fix itself up - even weeks later.

I would be really interested to find out why this happens and if its because GA is just struglling to process so much data. That would be my guess. If you have faced the same issue or have any input would love to hear from you.