To all of our U.S. publishers, we wish you a happy 4th of July! This weekend, take a chance to celebrate your liberty in patriotic and AdSense friendly fashion. Exercise your first amendment right to freedom of expression by creating more of the rich…
We recently posted about what a visit is worth and the importance of setting goals in determining a visit s value. We often get asked, How do I come up with goal values if my site is not an e commerce site? The answer: you can probably come up with intelligent values for your own set of goals. For example, if you know that 1 out of every 100 PDF downloads on your site results in a 500 sale, you can assign a value of 5 to that download. Other examples of goals are newsletter sign ups, product sales, and visits to your contact us page.Once you have defined a value for these pages which you can set in the Goal Value field within your Goal Settings page , you can better conceptualize the value of your website and your online advertising. Then you can explain it to others with data, to back up any marketing or design choices you make. You can also measure the success of your design or marketing experiments, by observing goal values to find out what works best.To learn more, take a look at the Conversion University article Monetizing Non Ecommerce Sites. Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team
The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn t move, kick it until it does. Phil WoosnamIn celebration of tomorrow s anticipated Brazil verses France game, we d like to give you soccer football fanat…
Hello, this is Kelly Ford, a test lead on the IE team and a big keyboard user of Internet Explorer. In an earlier post, Aaron Sauve provided The Keyboard Lover s Guide to IE. The IE community has given us quality feedback on our keyboard model during the beta cycle, and in beta 3, we have tried to bring more predictability and consistency with earlier IE versions in response to this feedback. In beta 3, we have made some changes in hotkey assignments, added some new hotkeys, and changed keyboard behavior on web pages back to match earlier versions of the browser in most cases. Bringing Back Menu Hotkeys In beta 3, we ve reverted hotkeys so that the hotkeys used to access menus remain the same from previous versions of IE. Specifically, this means that Alt a will once again access the classic favorites menu, Alt t the tools menu and Alt h the help menu. New Hotkeys We ve added several new hotkeys in this beta. Here s a list of what has been done: Hotkey Action Alt m Activate the Home button on the Command bar Alt j Activate the feeds button on the Command bar. Alt o Activate the Tools button on the Command bar. Alt l Activate the Help button on the Command bar. Alt c Open the Favorites Center set to display favorites. Ctrl Shift q Bring up a list of open tabs. Changes in Hotkey Behavior for the Favorites Center We have changed the way hotkeys for favorites, history and feeds work when accessing the Favorites Center. Ctrl plus the appropriate key i for favorites, h for history and j for feeds will open the Favorites Center set to the view indicated by the hotkey. Ctrl Shift and the appropriate hotkey will open the Favorites Center in pinned mode. A second press of the same Ctrl Shift hotkey combination will close the Favorites Center when in pinned mode. Giving Keyboard Control to Web Pages We ve heard from many web developers and users about keyboard behavior in IE7 with respect to web pages and applications that specify hotkeys. Beta 3 gives priority back to web pages for all keyboard assignments with the exception of Alt d. This will set focus to the Address bar, even if you use it as an AccessKey in a web page. This will address situations where AccessKeys like Alt p were going to the Page menu on the Command bar or Ctrl q was opening Quick Tabs instead of marking e mail as read in Outlook Web Access. Staying in Touch Feedback from the IE community is very helpful to us. Please let us know your thoughts on the keyboard behavior in beta 3. Also, we have an online help topic that lists all of our IE shortcut keys. Kelly FordTest Lead
The next round of video game wars is just beginning, but it already looks like Nintendo s Wii is in for a fight. Searches on the system have fallen 28 this month, and the Wii trails both the Xbox 360 and
Early last week, Jeremy Zawodny posted about moving his blog and disappointment with how aggregators handle 301 permanent HTTP redirects. In fact, there have been a number of high profile bloggers who have recently felt the pain of moving their feed including Robert Scoble and ResourceShelf by our Ask.com colleague Gary Price. Bloglines has always tried to ease the pain of moving your blog. If you set up a 301 redirect, Bloglines will automagically set that feed as a duplicate to the new feed after a week or two. Our customer support team has also responded to requests to mark feeds as duplicates. But we knew publishers needed a smoother process. As of last night, we now offer you an American style self serve fix it right now solution. We launched a new set of tools for publishers which allow you to claim your feeds and manage them within Bloglines. We re offering several nifty tools but we re especially excited about offering you a way to mark an old feed as a duplicate of a new feed. When we set a feed as a duplicate, all of the subscribers are brought over to the new feed so there s no need to ask your Bloglines readers to re subscribe. Follow the Account link header, top right to find Publisher Tools and follow the instructions to claim your feed. Trepidations about losing Bloglines subscribers when you move should be a thing of the past. You are now free to move about the blogosphere. The Bloglines Team
Have you noticed that the Ad Group page looks a little different these days? Here s Jon D. from the Campaign Management team to give you more info on the new tabbed look: We ve redesigned the Ad Group page to display more important account informat…
Betsynote: As I type this in for Jamie, it is hot. Darn hot. Too sunny must go kayak on the lake hot….This is not the Seattle I know! Around this time of year, a lot of us here in Redmond like to spend our spare time outside. Summers are beautiful in Washington State and we frequently check the weather to help plan our next hike or boating trip on the lake. We know a lot of you are doing the same. To get you this information quickly, we recently launched an Instant Answer for weather. We teamed up with MSN Weather to give you the current conditions, high low temperatures and four day forecast right on our search results page. You can see this in action by searching for the weather in a specific location, like weather redmond wa or chicago temperature. If you re a touring rock star and forget where you are, or just madly efficient with your keystrokes try searching for just weather. We estimate your location and show the temperature near you. This doesn t always work depending on how you connect to the Internet, but it s usually pretty close. In addition to sending feedback on this, we would really like to hear which instant answers you want us to build next. Is there a specific kind of content you want to be able to find faster? Something we could add to our page to make your life just a little bit easier? Please let us know. Jamie Buckley, Program Manager, Instant Answers
Betsynote: As I type this in for Jamie, it is hot. Darn hot. Too sunny must go kayak on the lake hot….This is not the Seattle I know! Around this time of year, a lot of us here in Redmond like to spend our spare time outside. Summers are beautiful in Washington State and we frequently check the weather to help plan our next hike or boating trip on the lake. We know a lot of you are doing the same. To get you this information quickly, we recently launched an Instant Answer for weather. We teamed up with MSN Weather to give you the current conditions, high low temperatures and four day forecast right on our search results page. You can see this in action by searching for the weather in a specific location, like weather redmond wa or chicago temperature. If you re a touring rock star and forget where you are, or just madly efficient with your keystrokes try searching for just weather. We estimate your location and show the temperature near you. This doesn t always work depending on how you connect to the Internet, but it s usually pretty close. In addition to sending feedback on this, we would really like to hear which instant answers you want us to build next. Is there a specific kind of content you want to be able to find faster? Something we could add to our page to make your life just a little bit easier? Please let us know. Jamie Buckley, Program Manager, Instant Answers
Like many of you, we have World Cup fever and wanted to feature a publisher who is successfully using AdSense on a football that s soccer to all our American readers site. We asked Ralf M bius of Fussballportal.de about his experiences with AdSense: Can you tell us briefly about how your portal got started? Fussballportal.de was launched in August 2004 as an addition and alternative to