Archive for March, 2009

by Mike Krumboltz

There is only one day of the year when folks have a legitimate excuse for lying, pranking, and making others look like, well, fools: April Fools' Day. With the day upon us, jokesters are scouring the Web for tips on how to pull the perfect rouse.

Over the past week, lookups on the holiday have soared 257%, and related queries on "april fools' day jokes" and "april fools' day pranks" also posted big gains. A deeper look at the Search data indicates females are, by far, the more devious gender (sorry, Mom). Women account for 68% of the searches on April Fool's Day. Also, anyone who works in an office should be on their toes. Queries for "office april fools' day pranks" and "april fools' day jokes for coworkers" are booming.

For folks seeking out tips, the Buzz is full of blogs and articles with mischievous suggestions. The Huffington Post lists their "top five pranks of all time." Included are the BBC's 1957 joke that spaghetti grew on trees, and Taco Bell's 1996 full page ad that claimed they'd purchased the Liberty Bell and changed its name. Plenty of people fell for both of 'em.

The aptly named Museum of Hoaxes lists their top 100 pranks of all time. Some are sure to inspire would-be Alan Funts. There's Burger King's "Left-Handed Whopper" scam and the BBC's joke about Big Ben going digital. For those who don't have access to a major media outlet or run a billion dollar fast food empire, we suggest checking out this list of harmless but fun pranks from FamilyFun.com.  Good luck, have fun, and try not to make your target cry.  

Since the launch of Google Suggest last August, you may already be used to the magic feeling of getting real-time suggestions just after typing a few keystrokes — that is, if you're searching on Google.com. But what if you're doing a search on Google in the U.K., India, Ireland or Australia?

Today we're happy to announce the international launch of Google Suggest. We've localized our suggestions to account for various cultural and local factors to offer suggestions that look familiar to our users. For example, English users in different countries will get suggestions that feel natural:

• If you type [liver] in the U.K., you're probably a Liverpool fan (but in the U.S. you'll get more suggestions about liver diseases):

• In Australia, typing [kan] will offer suggestions about Australia's most famous animal:

• In India, where the mobile phone market is exploding, it's no wonder that typing [no] leads to:

• In Ireland, there are [pubs] everywhere:

• While in the Maldives, typing [ato] leads to:

Google Suggest now covers 155 domains in 51 languages. Special thanks go to the Suggest team in Israel for their hard work in making this a reality.

So go ahead and start using Google Suggest wherever you are, and enjoy the special flavor of local suggestions.

Posted by David Kadouch, Product Manager

We often talk about optimization techniques here on the blog, but we've heard from many of you that you're looking for a more hands-on learning experience. With that in mind, we'd like to invite you to an AdSense Optimization Webinar we're holding tomorrow. During this interactive 1-hour session, members of our optimization team will explain and demonstrate ways to improve your ad and search performance. You'll also have the chance to chat online with them during the event.

The details:

AdSense Optimization Webinar
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 11am PDT (GMT -07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=572860900

You'll need to register before the event starts in order to attend, and we're only able to accommodate the first 500 publishers who register. If you're interested in attending the webinar, be sure to sign up using the link provided above.

If you're unable to attend this webinar, please know that we're planning to host more of these in the future. (And don't forget that soon, you'll be able to update your email notification preferences so we can personally let you know about them.)

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

CNET’s Webware, a tech site about “cool web 2.0 apps for everyone,” has announced its annual Webware 100 Nominees, and Live Search is pleased to announce that FOUR Live Search offerings made the list. WOO HOO!

Introduced in 2007, the CNET Webware 100 is a round-up of outstanding Web 2.0 products and services, nominated by the readers. The Webware editors select 300 finalists and invite readers to vote on the final picks. Live Search took home prizes in 2007 and 2008 and we need your help to go three for three.

Voting starts today, so visit the Webware website to vote for all your favorite Live Search products in three big categories, including:

· Search & Reference: Live Search

· Location-Based Services: Live Search 411 and Live Search Maps

· Commerce : Live Search Farecast (Beta)

While you’re voting for Live Search, don’t forget to show some love for the other Microsoft products nominated, including:

· Browsing: IE8

· Communication: Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail

· Infrastructure and Storage: Windows Live Sync and Windows Live SkyDrive and Live Mesh and Silverlight

· Productivity: Microsoft Office Live Small Business and Microsoft Office Live Workspace

Voting will end on April 30, 2009, at noon Pacific Time so be sure to vote right away, and spread the word to other fans of Live Search.

Thank you for your support!

Melissa Powell, Senior Product Manager, Live Search

Improve ROI from Shopping Comparison Sites

These days, I'm getting a lot of clients who want to increase their ROI on referral site campaigns. We'll explore this topic by talking specifically about shopping comparison sites. The same techniques are generally applicable to all kinds of referring sites. My goal is to help you track and identify the referring sites that bring you quality traffic and generate more business and profit.

We'll explore:

• How to identify shopping comparison sites in Google Analytics reports.
• How to assess revenue generated by each of the sites.
• How to export your Google Analytics data and merge it with cost data.
• How to analyze to identify winners and fix under performers.

Identify Shopping Comparison Sites in Google Analytics Reports

To identify the sites in question, check with your marketing team and get a list of all the shopping comparison sites you use. This sounds like an easy step, but sometimes it takes a lot of back and forth with your marketing team to get the complete list. In this list, you should see some common names such as NexTag, BizRate, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, DealNews, and Shopping.com. There might be other sites that are not as common but may be applicable to your vertical, so look for those too. You could also include other sites in this analysis such as Yahoo! Shopping if you have your products listed there.

Let's get started!

Say your site gets traffic from NexTag, BizRate, Shopping.com, and Yahoo! Shopping. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources, click on Referring sites, and then use this inline filter to quickly look at the sites you want to analyze:

You can examine time on site, bounce rates, and other readily available metrics.

If you like to review this report frequently, and you should if you are spending a lot of money on these sites, you can create an advanced segment with "Referral" as the medium and then list your comparison sites as the sources.

Assess Revenue Generated by Each of the Sites

In the same Traffic Sources/Referring Sites area, you can next click on the Ecommerce tab and get a full picture of revenue and conversion rates.

In this report, and for this specific site, you'll see that although NexTag generates a lot of visits, its conversion rate, 1% is less than half of BizRate which is 2.32%. You can also see that shopping.com did very well with a conversion rate of 2.94%. Traffic from shopping.com seems to outperform the rest as it has the highest conversion rate and also the highest average order value.

So far these reports are very helpful in providing easy access to how each source is performing and the revenue it is generating.

There is still one thing that is missing though - cost data! There is a cost in bringing these visits to the site, and what if the cost of listing our products on these shopping sites is higher than the revenue being generated? I would think that a ninja analyst as well as a novice analyst would definitely want to include cost data and ROI in their reports. After all, you are in business to make money, not just to improve conversion rates!

Export your Google Analytics Data and Merge it With Shopping Sites Cost Data

For now, Google Analytics doesn't allow importing cost data into its reports (except for Adwords), so we will export the GA data and merge it with the shopping sites cost data in a spreadsheet.

Step 1: In the above report (Traffic Sources/Referring Sites, with your sites filtered), click on the "Export" button, choose the CSV format, and save the file

Step 2: Get your cost data from your respective shopping comparison sites.

Step 3: Using Excel or a Google spreadsheet, open the CSV file and, insert your cost data, and run your ROI calculation

For our analysis below, the client has indicated that to make money (profitably) they can't afford to spend more than 25% of their revenue on advertising. So we created the Return on Ad Spend table below taking into account the client provided business metrics. (you can view this table at the following link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pkrS9PTOkmimeBKiGJ3oZMQ)

Analyze to Identify Winners and Fix Under Performers

• It is clear from the table above which sites are profitable, namely sites#2 and #4. Both had a less than 25% of Ad Spend/Revenue ratio.
• It is also clear that the site with the highest conversion rate, site#1, might not be profitable at all!
• What actions can be taken?
• See how you can get more of the high quality traffic from sites#2 and #4.
• Immediately investigate site#1's traffic because it is a top spender with an unacceptable ad spend ratio.
• Once you are done with the above, start examining the other under-performing sites.
• You can also look into average order value and create a different ROI baseline it. Maybe it is OK to spend more on advertisements for sites that bring a higher average order value.
• What could be causing such bad return on sites#1 and #3?
• Mismatch between product listed on the shopping site and product listed on your landing page.
• Mismatch in pricing: you advertise one price on the shopping site and when visitors come to your site, they find a higher price.
• Ineffective bidding strategy: you are paying too much for clicks on your listed products.
• Site related issues such as slow load time.
  
• Seasonality. For example, I'm sure Christmas ornaments aren't hot sellers in the peak of summer.
  

A few other comments:

• When analyzing sales/conversion/ROI, ensure that you have all data elements included. For example, if your online business allows for phone orders, you then would want to ensure that phone order revenue and cost data are all appropriately attributed to their original sources. This is much easier said than done but there is tremendous value in doing it!
  
• Averages often don't tell the complete picture, so digging deeper into the data of each site and its categories is likely to reveal even better insights.
• The above analysis is done for a one-time period. You would want to trend this data daily, weekly and/or monthly and watch for external factors as well. For example, a weak economy is likely to have a negative impact on sales across the board.

To summarize:

1. Look for opportunities to get more out of what you are spending. Don't let your comparison shopping site ad spend be set on auto-pilot.
2. Track and analyze on-site metrics including revenue by referring site.
3. Take one more step: merge your cost data and run your ROI calculations to find what is profitable and what is not.
4. Act on your findings!

Related Posts

• Grouping of Referring Sites in Google Analytics
• Tracking E-Commerce with Google Analytics Video
  

Posted by Feras Alhlou of E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

If you run an e-commerce site or use AdWords to direct traffic to your business' webpage, chances are you're interested in knowing what visitors to your site are clicking on, what content interests these potential customers and what avenues brought them there. The more you know about how people engage with your site, the better you are able to design successful advertising campaigns to help grow your business.

In Latin America, online advertising is growing as more and more small businesses initiate an online presence and publicize their efforts through search and display advertising. But less than 5% of web properties throughout Latin America rely on analysis tools to improve their website's performance. Last week, our offices throughout the region hosted several Analytics-themed events to give agencies and other clients a better look at several Google measurement tools that provide people with the means to analyze their site's flow of data, interest and readership in order to build a better advertising campaign.

In Mexico City, advertisers got together to learn about Insights for Search, Ad Planner, YouTube Insights, Analytics, Sitemaps and Website Optimizer, as well as DoubleClick tools. Presentations were designed to give companies an in-depth look at the Google tools that can be helpful for planning their marketing budgets during an economic downturn. Being able to measure data on what content interests people and where consumers are searching for information can help advertisers be more selective about how they invest ad budget. Since the great majority of consumers go online for information before making a purchase, the goal of the seminar was to familiarize advertisers with tools that can increase the reach of their campaigns, while giving them a better idea of what works and what people are searching for.

Meanwhile, our Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik visited São Paulo and Buenos Aires to speak to clients about web analytics and how to make the most of online marketing through analyzing metrics (check out his recent post on bounce rate for related information). Avinash made web analytics fun and accessible with colloquial comparisons (referring sites as 'BFFs'), and demonstrated how to optimize a website's performance with changes in color and layout, among other things. He was accompanied by Google's Latin America managing director Alexandre Hohagen, Brazil's country manager Alex Dias, and Argentina's country manager Adriana Noreña at a succession of events revolving around web metrics and website optimization.



The response and interest from customers and agencies to all of these events was indicative of the huge need for metrics and the ability to track ROI for their marketing investments, especially during these difficult times. For more information on Google Analytics tools, check out the Google Analytics Blog, the Website Optimizer Blog and the Conversion Room blog.

Posted by Alfonso Luna, Marketing Director, Latin America

by Michael Krumboltz

Just when you thought it was safe to eat nuts, the FDA is warning consumers to avoid pistachios due to salmonella fears. Fortunately, folks are getting the message loud and clear. Lookups are soaring on "pistachio recall" (+9,012% in Search), "fda.gov" (+1,675%), and "salmonella symptoms" (+264%).

As is often the case when a scary new illness makes its way into the public space, queries for "salmonella symptoms" boasted an especially quick surge. Concerned folks want to know if they have any cause for alarm.

The San Jose Mercury News explains that "healthy people exposed to salmonella may experience fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain." Health officials say that folks should seek medical assitance if they have any of these symptoms. To be safe, the FDA recommends consumers not eat any pistachios until "the scope of the contamination" is clear.

So, what sort of products are affected? According to MSNBC, California-based Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella Inc., was recalling more than 2 million pounds of the roasted nut. So far, there are no confirmed illnesses, however "two people called the FDA complaining of gastrointestinal illness that could be associated with the nuts."

Additionally, there is concern over products like spices and ice cream that may use pistachios. Officials are currently investigating what other products may need to be recalled. Again, to be on the safe side, stick with pretzels until somebody from the FDA says otherwise.

Ever wonder what people are saying right now about your company, brand, service, product, etc? Sideline, inspired by a recent internal hack project at Yahoo!, goes beyond the standard customer survey process to let you listen in real-time to people talking about your products and then use that feedback to enhance your service or help users with their problems.

Briefly stated, the goals of our project were to

• Create a desktop application that allows for the creation, grouping, and auto-execution of advanced search queries against Twitter
• Leverage existing skill-sets and tools
• Target the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and minimize the amount of platform specific code that must be written
• Open source the code so that others can learn from, contribute to, and/or extend the product as they see fit

Our team of front-end engineers are experts in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and PHP but didn’t have a great deal of experience developing desktop applications. So the question became, how to maximize our existing skill-sets for desktop development? The answer for us was to utilize the Adobe AIR platform, which “lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems”. Since AIR supports HTML/JavaScript development (in addition to Flex and Flash), we could build our application on traditional web technologies, on top of YUI, and have it run on the three main desktop operating systems.

YUI Grids in AIR

Sideline contains an extensive implementation of the YUI Library. It should hopefully serve as a great example for other developers interested in experimenting with YUI and Adobe AIR. The application’s layout is constructed using YUI Grids and even makes use of the recently added ARIA Landmark Roles. Grids worked very well in the AIR environment and made redesigns that occurred mid-development easy to implement with minimal code changes. Just like in the standard browser environment, YUI Grids can serve as a great foundation for an AIR application even if the developer decides against using the rest of the JavaScript library and opted for another framework instead.

YUI Components in AIR

In addition to Grids, Sideline also utilizes the Dom, Event, Drag and Drop, JSON, Selector, Container, Button, Menu, Slider, and TabView components. I am happy to report that all the YUI components performed extremely well in the AIR environment and required no modifications. Sideline does implement a fairly customized design and thus some customized skinning of the YUI components was required, but no core modifications. Most AIR applications tend to have a rich desktop application feel to them. For this level of customization, the YUI skinning article is a great reference to get started.

Beyond the Browser

A major enhancement of the Adobe AIR platform over the traditional web environment is access to a local SQLite database and the user’s file system. Local database access is becoming more available in traditional web environments through technology such as Gears and HTML 5 client side storage, but for now these solutions are not ubiquitous. For those interested in AIR development, Sideline has tackled many of the common tasks that a typical AIR application might require, e.g., fetching external data, handling application updates, interacting with the local database, working with the local filesystem, launching native browser windows, displaying desktop notifications, etc. It should prove to be a useful reference in that respect.

Tips for AIR Development

1. Know your environment. AIR uses the WebKit open source browser engine under the hood. Traditional web development is aimed at making an application or site work across as many browsers/operating systems as possible. Which browsers to support typically comes down to a cost versus usage factor. However, coding for a single rendering engine reduces the need to prepare for and test against the slue of potential combinations in the market. That being said, it still makes sense to develop in a cross-browser manner where possible since there may come a time when the application needs to find its way back into a more traditional browser environment. Using a framework like YUI will make that process relatively painless. It is simple to see the browsers and platforms currently supported by YUI via the Graded Browser Support chart. Developers should be fairly safe to take some basic shortcuts when building AIR application (using -webkit-border-radius makes rounded corners a breeze), but use them sparingly and document them so they are easy to spot later.
2. During the development of a complex application in any environment a solid set of debugging tools is a must-have. Adobe provides some useful tools for debugging AIR out of the box. Developers should investigate the AIR Debug Launcher (ADL), the HTML Introspector, and the HTML Source Viewer. In addition to the bundled tools, Aptana Studio with its Adobe AIR Plugin proved to be an indispensable asset. The Aptana plugin provides assistance with creation of an AIR project, importing of common JavaScript frameworks, debugging, packaging/exporting, and digitally signing the application.
3. Don’t forget the performance techniques we’ve learned from the standard browser environment (i.e., optimize your images, minify and combine the application’s CSS and JavaScript files, and for heavy event-based applications like Sideline, take advantage of event delegation techniques). AIR applications run on the desktop and so there is a bit more leniency with performance than in the typical browser environment, but remember just like the browser itself, the AIR container also consumes a chunk of the system’s memory even before the application’s custom code kicks in.

The Road Ahead

The beta version of Sideline can be installed at http://sideline.yahoo.com. The code is open source under the terms of the BSD license and hosted on GitHub. We welcome contributions, feedback, and/or suggestions. Also, in the spirit of keeping things as open as possible and supporting emerging technology we will likely port Sideline to Titanium in the near future. Some initial work has already been done on the port and will continue over the coming weeks. It is also quite possible that Sideline will end up implementing a JavaScript ORM such as JazzRecord to ease database interactions across platforms. If anyone has additional tips for supporting multiple platforms we’d love to hear them.

Now go forth and fork it!

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Fox Nation (Searches increased by 2,274%). Fox News is looking for a few good conservatives. Actually, as many as possible, for its new online site.
2. CIA jobs (+746%). Being a spy might be top secret. Recruiting spies is not. The agency has taken to the radio to attract talent to "the Farm."
3. Sock monkey (+428%). The tried and true toy for these recessionary times.
4. California earthquake (+1,600%). Yes, there was a small temblor in northern California yesterday. No, the state hasn't fallen into the Pacific. Yet.
5. Easter decorations (+216%). Dust off the egg-painting kit and the fluffy bunnies.

In our ongoing quest to connect with those of you across the search universe, we’ll be at Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco starting today. We’ve been on the road quite a bit lately, talking about where search is today and getting feedback on areas where people think the current experience comes up short. Web2.0 Expo is no different. Let’s talk!

Live Search will be in the mammoth Microsoft booth (#600) in the Expo Hall, sharing the excitement with our friends from Silverlight, Surface, Azure, and IE8, to name a few. Also, rumor has it that Windows 7 will be on board to demo in the space. Not to be missed.

Even if you can’t make it, let us hear from you. Drop us comments or questions in the blog and we’ll be sure to get back to you.

Now you must excuse me as I go change into my “stylish” booth shirt…

Aya Zook, Product Manager, Live Search