Analytics has long been a great tool for small business. Not only does it give you the power to see what’s happening on your website, but it’s 100% free.

We all know that you can’t manage what you don’t measure – so Analytics (or some sort of stats package) is vital if you want to improve your website over time.

Well it just got a lot easier to do so

Google have just announced a number of improved features for Analytics, such as:
- better engagement metrics. eg you can know count a goal as someone that stays on the site for over 2 minutes
- up to 20 goals for each profile (at last!)
- filtering of results. eg don’t wade through a list of thousands of keywords, now you can filter say those with a low bounce rate & high time on site. sweet.

and many many more

check it all out here
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-analytics-now-more-powerful.html

eg. setting a goal that a visitor stays for over a minute

The Google Local Business Centre (LBC) is becoming more & more important.

As Google really starts to ramp up its local search efforts, your Local Business Listing will become the cornerstone for a number of services that are coming soon.

So step 1 – go to ‘google accounts’ & set up your free Google Account. This gets you access to all of Google’s services & is becoming a must have item (AdWords, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Website Optimizer, Local Business Centre, News, Alerts etc etc)

step 2 – go to the Google Local Business Centre & claim your local listing. It’s a free service & you may find that Google has already written some details about your business (it gets this from the Yellow Pages & a few other places). But if you’re smart, you’ll claim your listing & add some more info (eg opening hours, categories of products & services you sell & images)

step 3 – you’ll probably also want to ask your happy clients to give you a good rating. These are going to be more important in the future, so get started now & start to build up a history – but don’t try & game the system by rating yourself, or asking all your staff to do this… let it happen naturally over time (& maybe prompt a few customers if & when you need to!)

step 4- stay tuned for more updates on this soon & a detailed free guide we’re creating to help you get listed

step 5 – stop reading & claim that listing today. Or watch this first, up to you.

Here’s a great & very useful tool that you may want to try in your business: Dragon Dictate Preferred Edition.

Combined with a good headset (we use the Logitech ClearChat Wireless Headset) this is a fabulous tool that can have a huge boost on your productivity.

Essentially you talk, your computer types. Easy. And after a little bit of training, the accuracy is actually pretty good (in fact I’m using it now!)

You can also use it to create transcriptions of recordings – for instance created on your iPhone. Here’s how:

Use the Voice Memos app to record you talking.
Sync your iPhone with iTunes & find the ‘voice memos’ playlist.
Right click the recording & choose ‘create mp3 version’
Then go to ‘recently added’ & drag the mp3 file to your desktop (to make it easy to find)
Then from the Dragon icon (in your toolbar) choose ’sound | transcribe recording’
& in just a few seconds your voice is automatically turned into a document!

Of course this might need editing a little (you might also want to use commands like ‘new paragraph’ while you record to make it easy to read the text) but the bulk of the work is done for you.

Now you have no excuse not to create that blog post, article, free report or even ebook that you’ve been putting off for a while

How do you incentive your staff, workers, outsourcers?

Check out Dan Pink’s fantastic TED talk & you might find you’ve been going about it completely the wrong way…

This post will be one that grows over time (please add your comments below with your own recommendations)

Free - Chris Anderson

So to kick things of, August’s must read book is Free: The Future of a Radical Price (he of Long Tail & Wired fame – not the TED Chris Anderson)

Free is an amazingly well thought out book. Plenty of different examples of how Free (& the internet) are changing the face of business every day. But it’s also much more than a business book. It’ll make you think about a lot more than your business plan or how to use ‘free’ in your business.

Still only in hardcover, so quite expensive in most Aussie book stores – but check out Fishpond – they guarantee to beat Amazon’s pricing & this book is one of the few they ship within 24 hours! (usually 3-5 working days). At last a decent online store for us Aussies!

In it’s quest to continually make the bidding process more transparent, Google is rolling out a new tool – Bid Simulator.

Look for a little icon next to the keywords in your account & give it a click (you’ll only see it for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic & clicks)

(more help from google here)

Now you see what will happen if you change your bids & get a feel for exactly how different the traffic levels will be if you bid more or less.

It works by looking at your Quality Score (QS), the QS & bids of your competitors (which you of course can’t see) & the probability of your ad getting clicked when in various positions on the page.

You’ll find some graphs are very flat, but others are skewed dramatically – those skewed curves offer plenty of potential to change your bids (often quite a bit) without huge affects on your traffic levels.

Have a play – don’t worry, you can’t break it!

If you use Google AdWords to target people in a local area you might this this very very interesting…

You’ve probably noticed a “bonus 5th line” appearing under your ads if you target a particular city or state, rather than an entire country, eg:

BUT, did you know you can now show your entire address under your google ad (read google’s help here)

How do You show your business address under your Google ad?

The first step is to target an area using the ‘Custom’ address option (the 4th of the 4 location targeting choices)

Next enter your address into the box provided:

Make sure you tick that little box that asks ‘allow address to show in my ads’

And choose a radius – ie the distance around your location within which you want to show ads. That might be 10kms, 20 miles or 200 kms – it’s entirely up to you (although in Australia, I’d use 10kms as a minimum).

You can then see the visual for this address & radius on the map to the right:

click the ’show ads here’ button & you’ll see confirmation in the lower left-hand box – note you can choose multiple addresses, as long as they’re relevant to the business being advertised:

and you’re done.

Now when your ads show on Google – both on the right side and in the yellow box at the top of the left side – you’ll get a much better bonus 5th line… your actual address.

So few people are using this feature it’ll really make your ads stand out. Try it today.

‘Malcolm is Wrong’ is the title of Seth Godin’s latest post

I don’t usually link to Seth’s (wonderful) blog, because I’ve always figured if you’re reading my blog you’ve definitely read Seth’s by now… but I’m meeting more & more people (in Australia) that have never heard of Seth, let alone read his blog or books.

So please – I urge you… go now & read today’s post. Hopefully it’ll make you think a little, maybe even a lot – about your business/job/startup

Then pop over to amazon & invest in some of his books. He really is the most insightful marketer for the 21st century. At a minimum buy The Dip
& Tribes. They’re short, easy to read & hard to put down. Most of all the wisdom will last for years. Go on, invest $10 – you’ll be extremely glad you did.

Making sure your business has good reviews is now more important than ever as there’s now an option on Google Maps to “narrow results by user rating”

Over time it’s very likely that more & more Google users will choose this option to refine their search results – so the sooner you can gain some 4 and 5 star reviews from your clients the better.

Just ask them to navigate to Google Maps, type your business name & click the ‘reviews’ tab. It’ll only take them a minute or two – and maybe you could reward them with a voucher, discount, freebie or some personal time – whatever makes sense for your business model.

If you follow me on twitter (@thegoogleguy) you’ll already know that the new version of AdWords has been out for a few days.

It’s well worth downloading & has a couple of funky new features (new videos coming soon to current clients)

Sorting Columns in AdWords Editor

If you’ve always been annoyed that you had to export your campaigns to Excel in order to be able to properly sort the various columns, be annoyed no more. Now you can choose up to 3 columns to sort by (eg by AdGroup, then by Clicks – to help find ads that need editing)

CSV Import to AdWords Editor

It’s always been easy to paste your changes into AdWords Editor, but you could never import a CSV file – now you can.

This video from the AdWords team will show you how… you don’t even have to make sure the column names are in the right order, Google will help figure this out for you – nice.

Selective Downloading

This has probably been the biggest timesaver around our office with the new version. Just update the campaigns you want to work on, not the entire account. It’s also simple to just download ‘active’ campaigns.

Conversion Metrics

You’ve seen them in the new interface, now you have em in the Editor too.

“many per click” and “one per click” columns are now available – more on these another time.

Convinced? Go here to download the latest version of AdWords Editor & as always, drop us a note if you want more video tutorials on how to use this fantastic, time-saving tool.