Google Beat – Premier Episode 1

Google Blog officially announced the opening of the Google beat youtube channel today and writes:

Using data from Google Trends, Google Insights for Search and some additional tools, the Google Beat will give you a snapshot of some of the topics that prompted people to turn to the web over the past week. You’ve probably seen our previous deep dives into Google search trends, like our annual year-end Zeitgeist and posts here about search trends related to events like the World Cup, the Oscars® and beyond. Searches can be unexpected, and sometimes what’s popular one week could never have been predicted the week before (think of Falcon Heene, last October’s “balloon boy” or Steven Slater). We’re looking forward to seeing what our data will reveal.

So if you are interested you should check out Google beats premier video embedded above (or click here), and don’t forget to subscribe to the Google Beat YouTube channel to get the regular updates.

Personally I really like the idea and I did enjoy the premier video. However I’d love the videos to be slightly longer and cover some of the international searches too. In case Google hasn’t noticed, there are people who uses google search outside the U.S.

This is a Guest Post by Michael Jenkins, Director of Shout Web Strategy. Shout is an online marketing agency based in Melbourne, Australia that is specialized in Search marketing, conversion rate optimization and web usability testing and more. You can read more of their articles in the Shout Blog.

No matter how big or small your business is, you are most likely trying to tap into the new media that has evolved in the last couple of years. Social media is the cool kid in town. Every website owner now works extra hard to get some ’social love’. There are lots of factors that determine the success of your website or campaign in the social media space. But if you focus the right amount of time on the four main pillars of social media marketing, you are most likely to succeed. The four pillars are: Research, Content, Socialize and Testing.

It is logical to start any decent social media and SEO strategy with research. The more knowledge and tools you accumulate, the better prepared you will be for your tasks and the upgrade of your site’s content. As you know, websites would simply not exist without content, and search engines would have nothing to monitor and analyse. In a way, content is the glue that holds everything together and, therefore, should be considered as one of the main component of social media marketing.
Every successful marketing strategy slots in time for socialising. This is necessary, to spread the word about your company’s brand. Just think about it, if nobody hears about your products and services, who will buy them?

Aside from research, producing quality content and promoting your company through social media sources, marketers should also spend a fair amount of time testing. Analysing your website’s performance is one of the most efficient ways to determining your strengths and weaknesses. Now that we have established which components are vital to your online survival, and why, lets look at them in detail below:

Research

Doing proper research is very much needed in the social media space. It has to be conducted often and at regular intervals. Listen to what your audience says, because if you don’t, you will be unable to understand what their needs are and eventually your online presence will fade. You can avoid such a disastrous situation by incorporating social media monitoring programs into your online marketing strategy. Without your collected social data, the guidance of your audience, the support of influencers, and a chance to participate in real-time marketing opportunities, you will be flying blind in cyberspace.

While there are many things to monitor, pay close attention to these 4 elements, as they can help you achieve success in your social media campaign:

• Define Your Social Channels – If you know your audience, you know where they socialise online. Do they interact on Facebook or Twitter, or are they LinkedIn members? Some people prefers media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, while others regularly visit popular forums and niche blog sites. Through social media monitoring you will discover where your followers gather, which will help you decide which social channels you should focus on most.
• Acquire Social Keyword Insight - Proficient social media monitoring tools are able to analyse anchor text, tags, comments, and other forms of written content to identify keywords associated with your particular monitoring requests. The results of such an inquiry can be quite helpful as they will show you which subjects your audience is interested in. Furthermore, once you know your followers’ web behavior and interests, you can manipulate your website’s content and optimise around those ‘hot’ topics.
• Identify Your Influencers – Research will also help identify your influencers, or the people who are – intentionally or unintentionally – promoting your company. Once you have categorised your influencers, you can prioritise who you want to connect with.
• Track SERPs - Social media monitoring resources do not track search engine results pages (SERPs), but you can. Monitor key terms that are relevant to your business, as well as the social sources that use them. For instance, if Google displays blog posts containing certain competitive keyword phrases first, you may benefit greatly from blogging or commenting on those issues. Just don’t forget to include a back link to your own site.

Content

One of the growing industries in online marketing revolves around Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the creation, optimisation, and promotion of web content. Copywriters, editors and publishers pop up like wild mushrooms, creating great quantities of new content, and giving all businesses a chance to acquire a wide variety of promotional materials. Be careful though, as not all content is appropriate or of good quality. Many people believe they are superb writers, when in fact, they are not. Beginners or hobbyists simply do not have the skills, or they only practice traditional paper writing, which is quite different from the keyword-rich content necessary to stand out on the Internet. Publishing content online is more than uploading creative features and information about your products and services. Today, customers want more, and expect web pages with inviting images, informative videos, relevant audio, charts & statistics, and various file types that can be used for promotional purposes on social channels. Search engines recognise highly targeted content quicker, which will benefit your rankings. The faster you show up in a Google, Bing or MSN search query, the sooner potential customers will find you!

Socialise

Socialising is quite beneficial to those companies familiar with the most popular social media sources in their industry, a target audience, and rock solid content. But that is not enough. They also need a plan to connect all these elements so they can be used to communicate with their customers and prospects.

Be smart and don’t waste your marketing efforts. Instead, concentrate them on the following three socialising aspects:

• Study Your Buyers’ Personalities – Discover what your customers do on social sites. Widen your research so you will also find out what their consumption and sharing preferences are. What persuades them to buy something, and who do they share their shopping experiences with?
• Expand your Social Networks – Although a lack of time is often the main cause, there are numerous reasons why marketers fail to expand their social network circles. Nonetheless, it is important to maintain your social connections. Even if you are overloaded with work, try to spend at least 10-30 minutes a day writing blogs, following up on comments, updating your Facebook page, tweeting, etc. That is all you need to keep networks growing organically.
• Carefully Select Your Promotions – Familiar with the preferences of your audience, you can now develop promotions that will further your business. Blogs are quite helpful, but so are other advertising features like cartoons, videos, and audio sound bites. Switching between different promotional options will give you valuable exposure on all your preferred social media sites.

Testing

Anyone involved in web development & maintenance, social media marketing, and SEO understands that ‘testing’ is crucial to success. Though many social media analytics and monitoring tools are free, or cost little; they usually take little time to learn. Do not ignore them, but use them to your advantage. Study the information they provide thoroughly and monitor your progress as you optimise your keyword selection, improve your content, and upgrade your social media strategy. Do A-B testing and see which one works and which doesn’t.

Changes do not translate into overnight, earth-shaking results, not even if you employ the most elaborate social media strategy. Be patient, and before you know it, your online identity will start to grow. Success will be yours, but remember, you will have to keep up the good work to continue with your success.

According to Google, they have done a lot of testing (I’m sure they have) and starting the first revamp initiative with the following ad units:

Leaderboard (728×90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except in the case when only one single ad is showing)
Medium and large rectangles (300×250, 336×280): the URL is now in the same line as the title

In addition to the layout, Adsense publishers may also see a few minor adjustments made to the font size. For instnace, the font size for the leaderboard with four ads is much more readable now compared to the previous version.

Here is a sample of how they may look like:

My Two Cents: I’m personally very excited about this news from both Advertiser and Publisher stand point. I do like the new design/layout of the Adsense Content ad units and I’m pretty sure that this will have a big positive impact on the CTR. I am yet to see these units popping up anywhere on the web but as I understand, Google is slowly rolling this feature out to all Adsense publishers.

So what do you think of this new ad design? Share in the comments!

Google Analytics is free and powerful web analytics tool that gives webmasters all sorts of statistics about their website. Over the years Google analytics has really evolved with amazing new features and become a strong product for any small-medium business or even an enterprise.

Recently during a session with one of my client (who runs an online t-shirts store), I went over some of the analytics feature that he wasn’t using. In fact he was totally clueless that many of those even existed. Even though these features have existed inside Google Analytics for quite some time now, but an average webmasters never bothers to check beyond their total number of hits on a day, traffic sources and so on.

So I decided to do a quick post highlighting some of the ‘less-used’ features of Google Analytics and why you should start using them.

1. Google Analytics Alerts (Intelligence): Google Analytics intelligence comes with a set of default alerts that will show you interesting trends in your analytics data, 24/7. When something happens out of ordinary, it is important that you get access to that information fast and focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless pile of data. The Automatic Alerts stores historical data as well so you can go back in time and look at some of the automatic alerts which has been triggered by Google Analytics. This can really help you discover insights that might otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, if your site’s bounce rate suddenly increases or say Search Traffic suddenly decreases, Google Analytics should be able to catch that and alert you to dig down further. Google Analytics also gives you the flexibility of adding custom alerts with your own variables & rules. Watch the following video to learn more:

2. Comparing Stats with your Past Data: Everyone loves the calendar feature that lets you see all your stats for a specific time frame (e.g. 22nd July 2010 – 29th July 2010). But sometimes raw figures doesn’t really make much sense if you don’t have anything to compare those with. Fortunately Google Analytics gives a easy way for anyone to compare their stats with a past timeline. The best part is it also calculates the difference in numbers for you and give you a quick overview of the comparison. To access this feature, simply check “Compare to past” in the calendar and it will let you select the time period of your past stats.

3. Customize your Google Analytics Dashboard: By default the Google Analytics Dashboard shows some basic widgets like Site usage, visitor overview, goal overview, content overview, traffic sources overview etc. But lets say if you are running an eCommerce website, you may also want to look at some other widgets on your dashboard like – Adwords overview, Top Landing Pages, Search Keywords etc. So if you like to see any particular widget on the dashboard, simply go to that specific page and press “Add to Dashboard” button on top. Now if you go back to your Dashboard you will see that widget at the bottom of the page. You are also free to drag-and-move all the dashboard widgets in any order you like. If you don’t find a particular widget useful and think that its taking up your dashboard space, simply press the cross (‘x’) on the corner to remove it from your default dashboard view.

4. Segment your Traffic using Advanced Segmentation: Analyzing your data in aggregate is not very useful, as it doesn’t give you the right insights of the many individual factors that builds up the overall stats. Google analytics comes with a very powerful segmentation tool that you can use to identify which segments of your traffic are performing and which are not. This leads to more analysis on the under performing segments and eventually an increased overall site performance. There are a bunch of default segments available, that makes it very easy for you to segment out your paid and organic search data or just perform some analysis on the visits with conversion and so on. Once you are comfortable with the basics, you can also make up your own custom segments and save them for later user. Watch the video below that briefly goes through the GA Advanced Segmentation feature.

5. Setting up Goals: Every website has some business objectives that it wants to achieve. For an eCommerce store it may be the number of raw sales, for a consulting business it may be the number of leads thats comes from the site’s contact page. Google analytics makes it very easy to define and track the business goals of your website. This comes very handy to justify the amount of money/resources that you are spending in order to achieve some of your business goals. For instance, you may have heard that twitter/facebook brings in a lot of traffic to a website and lets say so you have started spending 8 hours day on those sites trying to promote your products. Maybe you have gotten a couple of hundred visitors but without proper tracking it would be very hard for you to know whether it was worth all the effort? Because any typical analytics stats would only tell you that you have received “X” number of visits from Facebook or Twitter. But what it doesn’t tell you is, how many of those visitors has also made a purchase fro your store or has performed a positive action that helped your business in any way. With Google Analytics Goals tracking, you will be able to know exactly that. If you are spending money on PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising), Goals are a must have. You can learn more about setting up Goals in Google Analyics here.

Bonus:

Make it a habit to check your Analytics Data: Many website owners set up Google Analytics on Day 1 and never log back in to check what is actually happening. Having Google Analytics on your website doesn’t help you if you are not making good use of the data and insight it provides. So it is very important that you make it a habit to look at your stats regularly based on which you can further tweak your web strategy and (hopefully) improve your site’s overall performance. You can make Google analytics send you a daily/weekly/monthly report via email, so that you get access to all the stats right from your inbox.

So what is your favorite Google Analytics feature? Share in comments!

The Google Algorithm – Google had made a number of acquisitions over the years which puts them in competition with several other businesses. Does Google favors their own services over others? Well, New York Times thinks so and they are suggesting that Google should be regulated. But Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land brought up some things about NYT and explains why it should be regulated instead.

Exclusive: Apple’s FaceTime coming to iPod touch, iPad – Boy Genius Report has a pretty interesting scope today with some screen shots & details!

Google Announces Second Quarter 2010 Financial Results – “Google had a strong second quarter,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Solid growth in our core business and very strong growth in our emerging businesses drove 24% revenue growth year over year.

Apple Is Not Expected to Recall Troubled iPhone – As Apple prepared to address the mounting controversy surrounding the antenna of the iPhone 4, one thing appeared clear: the company does not plan to recall the popular device.

Twitter Continues To Help You Figure Out Who Exactly Is Following You – Twitter’s notification emails that are sent when you have a new follower are getting a much-needed makeover.The new emails have a cleaner interface and now include the follower’s location and bio. This should help users easily detect if a follower is a spammer. This is indeed an excellent addition.

Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month – Yahoo has confirmed today that they will be testing Bing powered results in the live search results.

WordPress And Thesis Go To Battle. Mullenweg May Sue. – Matt Mullenweg vs Chris Pearson and a never ending debate.

Video: David Letterman’s Top 10 Signs You’ve Purchased A Bad iPhone 4 – You got to watch this

Tweet With Your FACE: Why Big Brands Need Social Brand Ambassadors – Brian Carter writes why sometimes its better for a brand to have a face associated with their social media strategy.

Waging war on Wordpress: Posterous prepares the switch – Looks like posterous is creating a tool everyday so that people can quickly migrate their old data from other platforms to their own. Looks like tomorrow its “Migrate from Wordpress to Posterous” day!

Microsoft Opens Windows 7 SP1 Beta out to Public – Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 (along with SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2) for public beta testing. However, please note that the intended audience at the moment is enterprise users, not consumers.

Google Suggest as a Context-Sensitive Spell Checker- Google operating system reported that the Google Suggest that automatically does spell check for you when you miss spell something in your search query is context-sensitive…erm interesting!

Wrapping up World Cup Coverage with Yahoo! Search – World cup pretty much made everyone crazy (even the netizens). Digg deep into what they were searching for during the world cup.

Microsoft Launches Outlook Facebook Integration – Microsoft has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the newsfeeds of millions of Facebook users into inboxes across the world.

Man Claims Ownership of Facebook – This one is kind of funny, a New York judge has issued a temporary restraining order restricting the transfer of Facebook Inc.’s assets, following a suit by a New York man who claims to own an 84% stake in the social-networking company.

YouTube ‘Partner Grants’ to Offer Money to Video Creators – With hopes of producing more high-quality content, YouTube is ready to provide financial support for some of its amateur auteurs.

It’s Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It – A great piece by Steve Rubel on Digital Communications

Yahoo Style Guide is Available for order: Is it Web site, website, or web site? What’s the best on-screen placement for a lead story? How can you better know your site’s audience? Why should you? If you want to learn how to write and edit for a global audience
through best practices from Yahoo! then get the Yahoo Style Guide, which is available for order now.

Show Multiple Business Address of a particular area in your Google Adwords Ad: With the makeover of the Adwords Location extensions, you can now show multiple addresses that are relevant to a potential customer’s location.

Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software – Google is bringing Android software development to the masses by offering a very simple software tool that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.

Google Working On Secret New Ad Format: “Interactive Video Ads”: So finally Google is thinking of a different way to monetize beyond those blue text links.

Google Maps Labs Adds Automatic Short URL For “Link” Feature: If you often link to maps, you are going to appreciate this new lab feature of Google maps that allows you to shorten the Maps “Link” to be a more compact URL.

Android Market Will Hit 100,000 Apps This Month : So you still think android platform doesn’t have apps? Think again…

Would Gaming Fuel A Google Social Network? – Google has recently shown some interest in gaming & social networks (by putting $100 mil in Zynga) and also by ’staying quite’ about the rumors about a new Google social platform “Google Me”.

How Google’s buy of ITA signals where it’s headed in real estate – Google has recently bought one of the biggest airfare search & pricing provider ITA, and now everyone is trying to guess what are they going to do with it. Are they going to integrate it fully in search?

This is a basically Google’s move to put YouTube on your living room and essentially on all television sets & set top boxes that has access to the Internet. However I don’t quite like the way they recommend videos. I know its largely done automatically by the algorithm based on my preference & social graph, however I think Google needs to go one step forward here and find out a way to make these video content really ’suitable’ for the living room. I mean, I may have came across a cat video and “liked” it on YouTube but that doesn’t mean that I am willing to watch cat videos all day on my TV.

How to get Youtube Leanback?

To experience YouTube Leanback yourself, simply go to www.youtube.com/leanback, and you’ll note that a selection of videos — your “feed” — plays immediately. This feed is created based on your YouTube settings and preferences. This includes videos from your subscriptions and stuff that your friends are sharing on Facebook (Provided that you have connected your Facebook account with YouTube). You can also watch the most popular comedy, entertainment, news, or more. And if you don’t care for the video that’s playing, use the right arrow key on your keyboard to skip ahead to the next video, or try the up/down arrows to search, access player controls, and browse channels and videos. The best thing about this interface is that you won’t need your mouse for this experience. Check out the video below to learn more:

But thanks god that Google has finally listened to their users and started supporting Rich Text Signatures out of the box in Gmail. Simply go to your Gmail Settings page and the option will be right there for you. You can now customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.

The feature has also been added to all Google Apps users, so if your company has been using text based signature all this while – It is time for you to move to a more creative version of email signature!

Gmail now also supports a unique signatures for each email address that you have associated with your account. So you can use a different signature for each of the accounts that you use to send out emails from. On the Gmail Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu.

[Source: Official Gmail Blog]

Good news for Malaysia! Google DevFest Southeast Asia 2010 is now coming to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the 16th of July.

DevFest events are a really great opportunity to learn more about Google technologies, new APIs & other developer products. Google DevFest Malaysia 2010 will give you a chance to meet Google developers and engineers in person and ask them any questions that you may have about the Google products. Best of all, DevFest events are free for all developers! However seats at Google DevFest Malaysia 2010 are very limited, so you need to register early.

Google DevFest Malaysia 2010

Date: July 16, 2010 (8:30am – 6:00pm)

Venue: Technology Park Malaysia, Ground Floor, Enterprise 4, Bukit Jalil, 57000 Kuala Lumpur

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Agenda:

- 8:30am – 9:30am – Registration
- 9:30am – 10:00am – Introduction
- 10:00am – 10:45am – Maps
- 10:45am – 11:00am – Break
- 11:00am – 11:45am – Chrome
- 11:45am – 12:00pm – Demos
- 12:00pm – 2:30pm – Lunch & Google Office Hours
- 2:30pm – 3:30pm – Social
- 3:30pm – 4:30pm – Apps
- 4:30pm – 6:00pm – Hackathon

Topics Covered: This year the primary topics of interest are – Chrome/HTML5, Google App Engine, Social APIs, Maps API and more.

For more info about the event & registration, visit the official page.

So are you going to Google DevFest Malaysia 2010?