There are at least two important Google Analytics tutorials published here on SEO Chat which are worth reading before you read this tutorial.

1. Advanced Traffic Analysis Techniques with Google Analytics

2. How to Track Conversion Rates in Google Analytics

Those two articles assume you have a basic working knowledge of Google Analytics as well as background in website conversion rates.

What will you need to get the most out of the information in this tutorial?

1. Make sure you have installed Google Analytics on your website.

2. Make you have set up “conversion goals” in your website Google Analytics account (refer to the tutorial “How to Track Conversion Rates in Google Analytics”)

3. Make sure you currently have data available under the conversion goals. If you haven’t yet had any conversions tracked by Google Analytics, then you cannot make maximum use of the information presented in this tutorial.

Before going into a more in-depth analysis of conversions, let’s review the basic stats under the “Goals” section in Google Analytics. Go through the following procedure.

Step 1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.

Step 2. Under “Website Profiles” click “View Report” for your analyzed website.

Step 3. On the sidebar (below the “Dashboard”) click “Goals.”

Step 4. What you will see are the following report sections for “Goals.”

a. Total Conversions

b. Conversion Rate

c. Reverse Goal Path

d. Goal value

e. Goal Abandoned Funnels

f. Funnel Visualization

If you are asked the following questions, the above report sections can provide the basic stats about your website conversion performance:

1. How many total conversions has the website received in a one-month period?

Answer: Look under “Total Conversions.” Select the goal to provide the data you need.

2. With the conversions made, how high is my “conversion rate”?

Answer: Go to “Conversion Rate.” You should see the conversion rate expressed as a percentage.

If you wish to identify which of your products or services sell best, you need to click “Goal Verification.” It should provide you with a bar graph of the best-selling products (with their URL path).

This is very useful information that can either help you spot strong products (which you can further improve to increase sales) or spot weak products for which you might need to do more marketing work.

The percentage aspect of the bar graph is also important. If it says that the best selling products/services contributed 54%, it says that 54% of all of the website’s conversions for that specific goal come from that specific product.

If the data for this section is unavailable in your Google Analytics or if you are confused, you should configure your goal URLs as follows:

Match Type: Head Match

Goal URL: /thisisyourproductfolder/

Note: You can read another tutorial here on SEO Chat for details on configuring goals.

Most product URLs are dynamic in nature and use product IDs. So if you are selling downloads and the following are your sample product download pages:

/thisisyourproductfolder/?id=product_download_1

/thisisyourproductfolder/?id=product_download_2

/thisisyourproductfolder/?id=product_download_3

You can use Google Analytics’ “Goal verification” report to determine the best selling products. The stats reported might look like this (which is presented as a bar graph in Google analytics report):

/thisisyourproductfolder/?id=product_download_1 = 54%

/thisisyourproductfolder/?id=product_download_2 = 21%

/thisisyourproductfolder/?id=product_download_3 = 25%

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Unless you had all of your attention focused on the Lost season finale, it’s been impossible to not know about the problems Facebook has been having with privacy . It had gotten so bad that people created infographics showing the erosion of privacy over time and the byzantine settings to control your privacy. This caused some high profile people like Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte to delete their facebook profiles as a form of public protest. However, when Google is guilty of similar violations, those people (and the community as a whole) remain mute on the issue.

In recent weeks Google has been caught uncharacteristically with their pants down on more than one occasion. First they admitted they “accidentally” downloaded personal information. More recently, they were “forced” to admit they were geographically mapping all open wifi networks as part of the European street map program. I don’t know about you, but I think these are some pretty serious offenses.

But are Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte deleting their Google profiles or calling for any form of protest against Google?

So why does Google get to “slide by” while Facebook gets sacrificed on the altar? First off, Google has done an excellent job of perpetuating the “garage company startup” despite being a huge business and financial juggernaut. Don’t think for a second that the playful colors, funny logos, bean bag chairs, and lava lamps are by accident. It’s all intended to create that sense of being “googly.”

The second part is that Google creates a lot of good will by giving things away for free. It doesn’t matter that, by giving things for free, they destroy other businesses.  It’s almost as if people believe that, as long as long you get it for free, it’s all good. But free is a funny thing, and it motivates people in funny ways. People have been known to give away a lot of personal information to get things for free.  That tendency is something that a lot of startups depend on.

If the community isn’t going to protest, then it’s up to the government to step in. While the DOJ may want to go after Google, right now it’s not happening. Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist , but the spooks in the spy agencies have convinced the government that spying on its citizens is a good thing, and they might as well let someone else get their hands dirty doing it. And this isn’t a red state blue state debate: both Bush and Obama have extended the Patriot Act.

So what’s the next step? We each have to take a stand and educate our circle of friends and contacts about the clear and present danger that all of these companies put on our personal freedoms. Facebook, Google, or some other company–it doesn’t matter where the threat comes from. What’s important is that we see it for what it is and act accordingly. As Ben Franklin says “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.”

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Twitter has become ridiculously big over the past three years. Because of this monumental success and the ease with which crafty developers have been able to leverage the program’s API, Twitter has become an entire industry unto itself.

It’s almost not an exaggeration to say that just about every week a new start-up company emerges that has found a seemingly new way to incorporate an aspect of Twitter into their new product. Admittedly, many of them aren’t all that useful, but every now and again one pops up that appears to have a real chance of surviving.

It seems as if Trendsmap definitely falls into this category. Upon first glance it’s easy to dismiss the program as yet another application that incorporates Twitter and tries to repackage the results as something different, but if you spend a few moments becoming acquainted with this awesome new program you’ll see that it has a lot to offer in terms of useful information.

After all, sometimes you just want to open up your web browser and see what’s going on in your specific area. And yes, real-time search is becoming a trend of its own, but Trendsmap is super effective when it comes to quickly being able to reveal local events and information that’s important to a user’s individual needs and tastes.

Read More…..

Search4SEO team Wishes all it’s  readers a Happy Environment Day 2010

These days it seems as if Google is content to make enemies by stepping into other’s territory without much of an apology. The latest example of this was in 2009 when Google Docs was taken out of Beta and widely released. In a very short amount of time, Google Docs has managed to become both a smash hit and a major rival to Microsoft Word.

Aside from having the huge advantage of being free (Microsoft Office, and specifically Word in this case, is quite expensive), Google Docs also comes equipped with many–if not all–of the same features as Word. We can’t dismiss the service’s non-existent price tag too quickly, though, because it’s something that not only sets it apart from Microsoft, but it also sets it apart from other document sharing services, which usually require users to pay a fee. Not only that, but Google Docs also has the added benefit of combining the features of Writely and Spreadsheets, essentially acting as a web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service.

Users can now even collaborate in real-time with other users using the service. The collaboration features available in Google Docs may make this software suite a far more powerful tool than is Microsoft Office. Obviously, Microsoft now has some stiff competition, especially after Google unveiled new versions of Google Docs this past April. First, let’s discuss some of Google Doc’s most basic, initial features.

Google Docs Features

Google Docs is part of a growing series of free products called “software as a service,” which are usually characterized by being online versions of similar office suites. With Google Docs in particular, spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and forms can be created within the app, and can then be imported using the web or sent using e-mail.

This wouldn’t be a very useful service unless the documents could be saved to a user’s computer, and in the case of Google Docs, users can save their documents in a variety of formats, including ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, and Word. When saving these documents, they’re also saved to Google servers. This is quite helpful, because open documents are automatically saved in order to prevent the user from losing any data. Even more useful, the revision history of the document being made is kept on record as well.

The free Google Docs service is very big on organization, which is why it enables users to tag and archive their documents no matter what browser they’re using, as it supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and browsers running on Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux. The only downfall, if it could even be called that, is that Google limits how much users can store on their account. Currently, Google Doc users can store 5,000 documents or presentations, 5,000 images, 1,000 spreadsheets, and 100 PDFs. They are limits, but they’re not too shabby, and most likely far exceed the amount of documents and images the average person needs. Single documents cannot exceed 1 GB and as of January, spreadsheets are limited to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, and 99 sheets, and embedded images can’t exceed 2 MB each.

The last feature outlined here is perhaps the coolest, as it enables users and non-users to collaborate in the editing of a document in real-time online. More specifically, multiple users can share, open, and edit documents at the same time, and in the case of spreadsheets, all users participating in the editing process will be notified by e-mail of any changes made to the document.

Read More : Google`s New Collaborative Docs

For restaurant and small business owners, a bad review in the local paper was bad enough. Now they have to worry about bad reviews online. Review web sites form an entire subcategory, and since reviews turn up when users search, they can contribute to making or breaking a business. This article not only explores the trend, but shows why it’s a cause for concern, especially in the case of Yelp.

If you’re a restaurant or small business owner, negative reviews are the last things you’d want to read about your establishment. Thanks to the Internet–where everyone’s a critic–these are the kinds of reviews being published online and viewed by millions of people searching for local eateries and businesses on Yelp , a hybrid social networking, user review, and local search site with over 31 million users worldwide. Successful establishments who don’t have much to worry about can make light of their bad reviews, but for small, struggling establishments online user reviews can make or break their business.

Online reviews have become a powerful tool that create new hot spots and make businesses boom, but bad reviews can close establishments and deliver a major blow to income, popularity, and the number of new customers and referrals an establishment gets. Because of sites like Yelp, small businesses are being forced to navigate a new and unfamiliar world: do they ask their customers for positive reviews? Do they write reviews of their own establishments? Is there anything they can do to get rid of bad reviews that plague their business? It’s complicated for many, and to make matters even worse, there’s evidence that suggests Yelp extorts businesses to make bad reviews go away.

Balancing the Needs of Businesses and Users

In 2009 the New York Times wrote an article that shed light on many of the concerns expressed by small business owners whose Yelp pages had received bad reviews that they felt were unwarranted. Oddly enough, Yelp itself is in a precarious predicament. The San Francisco-based company must seamlessly balance the needs of the businesses featured, many of whom happen to be advertisers on the site, while also allowing its users to safely and anonymously say anything their heart desires.

So what’s the problem? There’s no telling who’s writing the reviews and whether or not they’re genuine. Yelp operates under the premise that reviews are truthful and, according to the company, this can be proved by looking at an establishment’s Yelp listing. If a business has similar ratings, reviews, and comments from multiple sources, it must be true, right?

At the time the New York Times article was first published, Yelp had made some changes to please business owners, but still refused to investigate reviews that local establishments felt were inaccurate. To this day, any company who receives a review cannot respond to it on their Yelp site, whether it’s good or bad.

To appease business owners, whose ads contribute to a majority of Yelp’s revenue, the site added Yelp for Business Owners in April of 2009. This new feature enables businesses to edit their company profiles, post special offers, and privately e-mail reviewers.

One of the biggest issues of contention for Yelp, or rather, where the real trouble began, was when reviews, good and bad, began disappearing.

Yelp has always remained rather tight-lipped as to how they determine which reviews appear on the site, which has led many users and businesses to question the company’s integrity. It’s not an idle question, either, because of how strongly Yelp reviews can affect a company’s business.

The NYT article referenced a San Francisco woman named Fawn Pierre, a puppy training business owner who received a large portion of her clients from Yelp. Pierre had three five-star reviews on her site, and when they disappeared out of the blue one day, she grew very concerned for her business. After contacting Yelp for an explanation, she was referred to a page on the Web site that said “reviews normally come and go from a business’s page.”

According to Yelp’s co-founder and chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s spam filter “scans for fishy reviews, such as those that seem to have been written by a malicious competitor or a business owner’s friend. The filter is often overly vigilant, in some cases removing legitimate reviews,” he said.

This is especially problematic for small business owners such as Pierre, whose five-star ratings were given by unbiased, paying customers. She told the Times, “Here I am, a person with only five-star reviews and I’m upset — there’s something going on here,” she said. “It makes me wonder: Do people who pay get a better deal; do their reviews stay up longer?”

Stoppelman contends that Yelp does not move negative reviews for advertisers and applies the same ranking system to all companies on the site. The executive believes that much of the confusion may come from the fact that advertisers on the site, many of whom pay between $300 and $1,000 per month, “are allowed to choose which review shows up at the top of their profile page and block ads from competitors. For other businesses, the first two listings a reader sees could be an ad for a competitor and a one-star review.”

According to the East Bay Express, a Bay Area weekly newspaper, Stoppelman’s response to allegations such as Pierre’s are too convenient, and what’s going on at Yelp is actually much more troublesome. Early last year the paper published an explosive piece , which asserts that Yelp customer service representatives routinely call business owners and attempt to persuade them to pay $299 a month in exchange for Yelp’s service of removing all negative ads from their business’s listing.

According to the article, entitled “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0,” some business owners were getting calls almost daily from Yelp. One restaurateur, who chose to remain anonymous out of fear of Yelp further damaging the reputation of his business, said Yelp employees would call informing him of how many visitors he’d had to his site in the past month and then would offer to remove some of the bad reviews that had recently popped up for a fee of $299 a month.

According to the Bay Area restaurateur, something seemed shady about his restaurant’s negative reviews. “When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved,” he said. “You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant. … Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top.”

This was something that was echoed by dozens of business owners the paper interviewed, with six saying Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove bad reviews if they advertised on the site. Other business owners claimed that positive reviews disappeared and negative ones almost magically appeared just after they declined to advertise on the site.

According to the article, “because they were often asked to advertise soon after receiving negative reviews, many of these business owners believe Yelp employees use such reviews as sales leads. Several even suspect Yelp employees of writing them.” Yelp admits to paying some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising and has admitted to one case in which a business owner who refused to advertise received a negative review from a Yelp employee, but beyond that the company denies all allegations brought forth in the East Bay Express article, though these aren’t new allegations by any means.

In fact, Yelp has received similar allegations so frequently that it’s even been addressed in the company’s Frequently Asked Questions page, and according to Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker, “Advertisers and sales representatives don’t have the ability to move or remove negative reviews.” He notes that “We wouldn’t be in business very long if we started duping customers.”

Despite their denial, many business owners aren’t giving up and have even filed lawsuits against Yelp. Several small businesses recently filed a class action lawsuit accusing the site of extortion. According to the New York Times, “The suit claims that Yelp will remove negative reviews and reinstate positive reviews for paying advertisers and says that business listings on Yelp.com are in fact biased in favor of businesses that buy Yelp advertising.”

In order to make some of the bad publicity go away and to alleviate some of the concerns these business owners have, the company has decided to make two significant changes as of April of this year. According to the Times, from now on “readers will be able to click on a link to see reviews that Yelp filtered out and advertisers on Yelp will no longer be able to post their favorite review at the top of the page.” Whether or not this will help Yelp and its soiled reputation remains to be seen.

The Trend Continues

Yelp certainly isn’t the first user-generated review site, and it won’t be the last. Chances are that when people are allowed to write reviews completely anonymously online, trouble will follow, as it has for Yelp.

The increasingly popular Foursquare game and phone app now enables users to review and recommend local establishments and sites such as Angie’s List, which enables its users to review and find doctors, search for a contractor, and locate other service professionals are part of an increasing number of review sites that give the power to the people. Let’s just hope that power doesn’t get abused.

Source

Now some people might make the case that because Google has all of this data they are eventually able to sort it out back of the house and it’s not an issue at all. However, by creating all of this unnecessary complexity at the URL level, Google is intentionally making the web a more difficult place for less sophisticated crawlers, spiders, and search engines to deal with. Basically they are laying down land mines to slow or trip up the competition. But that’s not something we would ever see come from the home of lava lamps and bean bags chairs, right? Right …

Read more about it @ Google Official Blog