I Love Google

The Google Developer team will be live streaming an important announcement about Google Apps this evening. Tune in on the Google Developers YouTube channel tonight at 6:00 p.m. PST to watch. Enjoy the show!

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Developer Marketing team

Ellen Petry Leanse Notizie dalla rete developers, Google Apps, News, News dalla rete

Last week, I sat down with Tim Horton, CEO of DiscountOfficeItems.com, to present a webinar entitled “How Discount Office Items Increased Revenue 6% by Switching to Google Commerce Search.”

I appreciate any chance to speak in-depth with Google customers and partners, but what I thought was most interesting about my conversation with Tim was a quick poll we ran midway through the presentation: When asked how satisfied they were with current search performance on their website stores, 82% of respondents said that they were neutral, unhappy or very unhappy with it. Only 10% of respondents were happy or very happy (note that about 8% of attendees don’t have search on their sites).

It’s exactly this discrepancy that spurred us to create Google Commerce Search last year. While the web as a whole is advancing at a staggering pace, online retailers are lagging behind in the overall quality and usability of their websites. As a recent Forrester study (see reference below) showed, 17% percent of frustrated consumers walk away from their online purchases, and 11% give up on shopping when unable to complete online research. Improving search - a key element on any website - can help bridge this gap and bring shoppers through the purchase cycle.

We hope you’ll join us next time to learn more about search and e-commerce, and in case you missed the webinar, you can catch the playback here.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Search team

"Web Sites That Don’t Support Customers’ Goals Waste Millions," Forrester Research, Inc., February 2010

Ellen Petry Leanse Notizie dalla rete google commerce search, News dalla rete

[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.]

When you don’t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it’s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry. Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords account, is an online marketing geek’s dream come true. Combine that with every skier’s dream of Utah powder, and life is good.

Day traders wake up every morning to check their portfolio — I get up and check my AdWords accounts. Backcountry sells gear and equipment for the outdoor enthusiast from ski boots to tents, and we sell all of it online. My job is to drive valuable, qualified traffic 365 days a year to Backcountry using AdWords. The AdWords platform lets me manage hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of keywords with relative ease. I have access to huge amounts of data that are revealed as daily ebbs and flows in impressions, clicks and bids. If you do a Google search for [telemark ski gear], you’ll see our ad:


Backcountry was founded in 1996 by two self-proclaimed ski bums, John Bresee and Jim Holland. Since then, the company has grown to hundreds of employees. I’ve been working here for over two years. Ultimately, our goal is to “crush it,” as some ski town folk say: work hard, play hard.

A typical powder day for me is like this one last Friday when Park City got 12 inches of new snow overnight. Here’s how AdWords helps me manage both work and fun.

7 – 7:45am
Roll out of bed.
Get the coffee going.
Fry eggs and bacon.
Check snow totals.

If it looks like a good ski morning, I first check my email and glance over our AdWords campaigns. All I need to do is my daily reporting to see that I’m on target for my revenue and cost goals. As long as things are okay, I email my boss to say I’ll be out slaying the white dragon.

Just as I have the ideal tools to maximize our online campaign performance, I have the tools avid skiers covet for deep days: fat, rockered skis, stiff ski boots, Gore-Tex jacket and pants, helmet, goggles, merino wool layers, etc. After I grab my gear, I’m off.

7:45am – 12noon

My commute to The Canyons Ski Resort takes 10 minutes. My friends and I know how to get the most out of our time on the mountain, balancing chair lift time, snow quality and vertical. Does that sound a bit like cost-per-click, conversion rate and top-line revenue? Take this lift to that lift, ski the trees while we wait for that chair to open, get after our favorite steep lines. Next thing you know:

Photo by Jim Harris

Face shots are invigorating. Hard to explain, best to experience! After a few glances at the time and collecting my thoughts, I make my way off the mountain.

12pm – 5pm

I head a few miles down the road to the office. As the afternoon goes by, co-workers will emerge from their cubicles; sometimes because legs are cramping up but also to share stories about how the morning was. Where did you ski? How was the snow? Smiles all around.

I settle into work knowing what I need to succeed at my job is at my fingertips. AdWords gives me visibility into my programs to prioritize and understand trends. It also makes it easy to add and edit my account without getting bogged down in manual work. I regularly use Keyword Performance Reports to monitor both head terms and tail terms to stay on top of revenue opportunities. I’ll take into account the average order value and also the percentage of clicks that turn into sales (rate of conversion) in order to manage our keyword bids. As I do bid updates, I also check the AdWords Preview Tool to see how our ads are ranked and what is going on with our competition. We don’t really focus on “cost-per-click” but instead on “cost as percentage of revenue,” which means the more people purchase, the more ads we can run. So the higher the return on advertising spend, the more room we have to grow our paid search presence.

5 pm – 8 pm

I like this afternoon time in particular because it’s quiet and I can really focus on data-crunching. Uninterrupted time and a strong cup of coffee are essential for doing long-term analysis.

Campaign Performance Reports are great for identifying long- and short-term trends as seasons shift or for changes in demand by brand. We just wrapped up our winter sale, so this is a great time for me to run an Ad Performance Report to analyze which versions of ad copy had the strongest clickthrough rates for future reference. Finally, Google Insights for Search is a fun tool. It’s a great way to connect with our buyers by discussing big-picture trends with the brands we carry. We can look at AdWords Campaign performance and try to tie it back to general search volume in the marketplace and identify product searches on the rise. In short, given our metrics focus, AdWords gives me the information I need to make decisions about specific keywords, bids, and our overall spend.

There are typically the same few folks hanging out at the office this late. We’ll exchange some pleasantries, and as the lights get turned off I’ll shut down my computer.

When I earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and cultural anthropology, I had only a vague idea how I was going to create a career with behavioral and analytical activities. It turns out online marketing is an exciting mix of real-time data and customer service. AdWords lets me manage campaigns very efficiently, so I have time to dig deeper and do the strategic analysis that makes this job about much more than just meeting revenue goals.

Finally, I picked Park City because it’s more than a ski town. Here fanatical skiers, trail runners, bikers, snowboarders and climbers can live year round and still have a meaningful career. I’ll always be grateful to companies like Backcountry and Google for making this possible: Backcountry for fostering the passions of the outdoor enthusiast, and Google for innovation in creating the forums and tools that really work for us.

Posted by Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry

A Googler Notizie dalla rete ads, News dalla rete

Numeri positivi per YouTube, il sito di video sharing di proprietà di Google ha fatto registrare un trend positivo nello scorso mese di gennaio, almeno stando alle statistiche di comScore.

Infatti, nel primo mese dell’anno, il sito ha fatto registrare un aumento di ben il 50% rispetto al traffico generato nello stesso periodo dell’anno scorso, portando …
Leggi tutto
Autore: Giuseppe Cutrone
Tags: video sharing, youtube

Giuseppe Cutrone Notizie dalla rete, Youtube Media 2.0, News dalla rete, Tendenze, video sharing

ILoveGoogle Notizie dalla rete Google Buzz, google buzzie, IPhone, News dalla rete

Mi fanno notare via email che tempo fa avevo scritto: «Se fatta con le dovute cautele la migrazione è indolore, e vi permetterà di dimenticarvi della “dead line” di Google»

In realtà non c’è mai stata nessuna “dead line” e urchin.js è ancora lì, vivo e vegeto. E’ però stato sorpassato DI FATTO da ga.js, in sordina. Google ha preferito evitare un evento traumatico per l’utente come la sostituzione del codice entro una certa data, preferendo continuare a investire sul nuovo codice e lasciando ad ogni webmaster l’onere di capire se e quando sarebbe stato il momento di abbandonare il vecchio codice. Penso che la mossa sia vincente, perché da sempre uno dei punti forti di Google Analytics è “iscriviti, copia il codice e basta”, che è uno dei tanti motivi per cui oggi è così diffuso. Troppo spesso noi che lavoriamo in questo settore ci dimentichiamo che la maggior parte delle persone non ha approfondite conoscenze di javascript e linguaggi lato server, e che non sa nemmeno che esistono una marea di funzioni che si possono aggiungere al codice di monitoraggio. Copiaincollano oppure usano un plugin/modulo per il loro CMS e vivono felici.

Queste persone piano piano si rendono/renderanno conto che le nuove funzionalità offerte da GA sono pensate espressamente per il nuovo codice di monitoraggio e migreranno volontariamente – o con l’aiuto di qualcuno – a ga.js, rendendo di fatto inutile costringere alla migrazione. Ritengo che in effetti questa sia stata una mossa azzeccata per non intaccare nemmeno di una unità l’ampia base di utilizzatori della nostra piattaforma preferita di web analytics

No related posts.

Marco Cilia Notizie dalla rete codice di monitoraggio, News dalla rete

If you use Gmail’s POP3 fetching feature to read messages from other email accounts, you’ve noticed that Gmail checks for new messages less frequently than desktop mail clients. Usually, Gmail tries to find new messages every hour, but some accounts are updated more frequently, especially if you get many messages.

“Once you’ve set up Mail Fetcher, Google will check your other accounts on a regular basis, and new mail will appear automatically in Gmail. Gmail checks individual accounts for new messages at different rates, depending on previous mail fetch attempts. At this time you can’t customize the frequency of automatic mail fetches,” explains Google.

While the most obvious improvement would be to manually set the frequency, Google decided that’s inefficient, but added a Gmail Labs feature that lets you manually refresh your accounts. Go to Gmail Labs, enable “Refresh POP accounts” and click “Save Changes”. When you want to check for new messages, click on the “Refresh” link at the top of the page. You should see a message informing you that Gmail is “fetching mail”.

Until now, you had to go to the Settings page, select the Accounts tab and click on “Check mail now” next to each POP3 account. Gmail solved this problem by adding a new feature to the existing “Refresh” link. “The refresh link at the top of your inbox will not only update your inbox with your new Gmail messages, it will also fetch messages from any other accounts which you have set up,” mentions Emmanuel Pellereau.

Alex Chitu Google Gmail, Notizie dalla rete News dalla rete

Last week we announced that you can edit details about a business listing directly through the Place Page. But sometimes you may find a place in Google Maps that isn't quite positioned where it should be. Let's say you know that your favorite pizzeria is near the corner but the marker for it appears further down the block. You want all hungry pizza-cravers to be able to find this great spot, so you want to make sure the marker leads them directly to the storefront. You could use our map editing feature (the "move marker" edit) to move it to the right place, but moving the marker to the right location is not always that easy, especially in denser urban areas, if the only reference you have are maps or satellite images because you can only get a view from above. So now we have added one more very handy reference for making a map marker edit: Street View images. It makes the edit much easier.

Let me show you how the editing feature works.

When you find a place that is in a wrong location, click on the marker and get an infowindow open as what you did before.






Posted by Jie Shao, Software Engineer

Kate Notizie dalla rete News dalla rete, Street View