Archive for April, 2009

Over the past few months, we've been gradually inviting publishers to integrate their AdSense accounts with Google Analytics, and today we're happy to announce that this feature is now available to all publishers. Integrating your account with Analytics will provide you with more detailed information about traffic to your pages and how users interact with your site.

Once you link your accounts, you'll find an AdSense-specific menu under the 'Content' section of the left-hand navigation bar on your Analytics homepage, containing these reports:

• The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren't monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.
  
• The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.
  
• Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.
  

You'll also notice that other sections of your Analytics account will show a new 'AdSense Revenue' tab. You'll be able to compare how much of your AdSense revenue is coming from new visitors versus existing ones, and view revenue based on user language.

To take advantage of these new reports, sign in to AdSense and click the 'Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics' link on your Reports Overview page. You'll be taken to a step-by-step wizard that will guide you through the rest of the process. If you use AdSense in a language that's not supported by Analytics, you can still link your accounts and view your Analytics reports in a different language.

We also recommend watching the video below, which will help explain the linking process:



Enjoy your new data, and don't forget to visit our Help Center if you have other questions about linking your accounts or reviewing your reports.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

For the past few months, more and more Analytics users have been invited to integrate their Analytics and AdSense accounts. Today that feature has become available to everyone. That means if you have an AdSense account, it's time to get it linked! Here's how:

Linking your Analytics and AdSense Accounts

1. Log in to AdSense
2. Click the link that says "Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics" on the Reports > Overview tab
   
3. Follow the on-screen instructions

Having trouble? Visit this help center article.


Which Reports are Available

Once you link your accounts, you'll find an AdSense-specific menu under the "Content" section of Analytics containing these reports:

• The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren't monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.
  
• The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.
  
• Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

How to Read the Reports

Check out this video to get a better understanding of how to use these reports:



You'll also notice that other sections of your Analytics account will show a new "AdSense Revenue" tab. You'll be able to compare how much of your AdSense revenue is coming from new visitors versus existing ones, and view revenue based on user language.

Enjoy your new data, and be sure to visit the Help Center if you have other questions about linking your accounts or reviewing your reports.

Like the new feature? Hate it? Leave a comment and let us know!

Posted by Sebastian Tonkin, Google Analytics Team

by Claudine Zap

We can all agree that the only thing better than ice cream is paying almost nothing for it. So of course we took note of some sweet deals around the country.

How cool is this: Carvel, the soft-serve chain that brought us Fudgie the Whale ice cream cakes, is celebrating 75 years with a freebie. To mark the anniversary, they're giving away their version of an ice cream float for a few hours on April 30. Dive in and chill out.

There's still time to get the cheapest scoop around at Baskin-Robbins, which is offering a per-scoop price of 31 cents until 10 tonight. Reason enough to nip out of work a little early today. Heck for 31 cents, you can treat the whole office.

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by Vera H-C Chan

As part of our continuing series, "A Searching Portrait: Barack Obama's 100 Days," here are the grumbles, economic obsessions, and stimulating controversies that dominated March 2009 searches. (Check for January and February posts on those searches.)

Home is where the stimulus is
Readers absorb headline after headline on the "economic crisis" and "stimulus package," and wonder exactly "what is an earmark?" As politicians tussle and experts weed through the back-and-forth on the subject, citizens grimly ask for more clarity on "what is an economic depression economy?"

The biggest Search activity concerns the homestead. The usual crowd-pleasing "economic stimulus package 2008 tax rebates" now pales in comparison to the clamor for details on "fannie mae loans," "financialstability.gov," "homeowner affordability and stability plan," "hud," and the "making home affordable initiative."

The talk circuit
Never at a loss for words, Barack Obama has a mild case of the giggles (or chuckles) on "60 Minutes" and apologizes for a Special Olympics line on "The Tonight Show." He recovers with a March 24 press conference and proves his power by pre-empting "American Idol." Although the economy dominates the conversation (and searches), people take time out to review his positions on "stem cell research" and "education." After the excitement over the White House Easter Egg Roll (and outrage over GM CEO Rick Wagoner's compensation), attention shifts overseas as the Obamas make their first European tour in their official capacity for the G20 Summit.

Getting personal with the president
Obama always has his opponents, and persistent rumors once again resurface, as do queries such as "obama antichrist," "obama birth certificate, and "the obama deception." Other chinks in the armor is No. 44's reliance on the teleprompter (spurring the query, "what is a teleprompter?").

All is not negative: "Saturday Night Live" wins with "The Rock Obama" skit. And even though "notre dame scandal" searches pop up when the university takes back an invite for the president to speak, a lot more people just care about the president's NCAA picks.

Look for the last 100 Days post of April searches on diplomatic etiquette, taxing questions, and the day of the dog.

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by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Al Franken (Searches increased by 675%). The still-not-yet senator Al Franken has hired a chief of staff in hopes that the race will be decided soon, in his favor.
2. Bo Obama (+410%). The first pet has created a crazy for the Portuguese water dog, both in search and in pet adoptions.
3. Eleanor Roosevelt (+272%). Another favored First Lady who made waves for being an outspoken voice for the poor during the Great Depression, and a human rights advocate.
4. Heyitsfree.net (+201%). Coupon clippers are for amateurs. Check out all the free stuff out there for the taking.
5. Sarah Jessica Parker (+160). The "Sex and the City" star's newest accessory: A surrogate mother who is carrying twin girls for the actress.

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(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome Blog)

For those of us who live and work on the web, the browser is an unsung hero. It's become the most important piece of software on our computer, but rarely is it given proper recognition, let alone fêted.

We invited some creative friends to make short movies about our own browser, Google Chrome, and then watched as they came back with dozens of interesting ways to portray the browser. After finishing his video, artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann wrote to us about his approach:

"Instead of thinking of what I wanted to show, I tried to think about what I did NOT want to show. I realized that when I use a computer or browse the web these days, the one thing I do NOT think about is... a computer.

There was a time when I knew the meaning of every single item in my system folder and had to wisely allocate RAM to an application before burdening it with a complex task. Dealing with a computer has become much simpler these days (if everything works), but much more difficult and complex (especially if it doesn't behave) — almost like dealing with a living creature.

I wanted to find a simple metaphor that explains what a browser does, without showing a screen, a keyboard, the letters WWW, pixels, zeroes or ones.

Initially I thought of my mom (the browser) who brings me (the user) a plate of spaghetti bolognese (the Internet). But since spaghetti bolognese is not a rewarding thing to draw, let alone animate, I went for the next best metaphor, which can be seen in the animation."

Along with Christoph's video, there are great shorts by Motion Theory, Steve Mottershead, Go Robot, Open, Default Office, Hunter Gatherer, Lifelong Friendship Society, SuperFad, Jeff&Paul, and Pantograph. You can view the individual Chrome Shorts on our YouTube channel as well as a quick compilation below.



We're really excited about the imagination and range of their ideas, and we hope you enjoy them.

Posted by Ji Lee, Creative Lab

(Cross-posted on the Google.org Blog)

In November 2008, we launched Google Flu Trends after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Google Flu Trends may be able to detect influenza outbreaks earlier than other systems because it estimates flu activity in near real time.

In response to recent inquiries from public health officials, we've been attempting to use Google search activity in Mexico to help track human swine flu levels. Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico is, as you might have guessed, very experimental. But the system has detected increases in flu-related searches in Mexico City (Distrito Federal) and a few other Mexican states in recent days, beginning early in the week of April 19-25.

In the United States, we were able to validate our estimates using data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We have not verified our data for Mexico in the same manner, but we've seen that Google users in Mexico (and around the world) also search for many flu-related topics when they have flu-like symptoms. Given the tremendous recent attention to swine flu, our model tries to filter out search queries that are more likely associated with topical searches rather than searches by those who may be experiencing symptoms.

While we would prefer to validate this data and improve its accuracy, we decided to release an early version today so that it might help public health officials and concerned individuals get an up-to-date picture of the ongoing swine flu outbreak. As with our existing Flu Trends system, estimates are provided across many of Mexico's states and updated every day. Our current estimates of flu activity in the U.S. are still generally low as would be expected given the relatively low confirmed swine flu case count. However, we'll be keeping an eye on the data to look for any spike in activity.

We're keenly aware of the trust our users place in us and our responsibility to protect their privacy. Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico -- like Google Flu Trends -- cannot be used to identify individual users. The patterns we observe are only meaningful across large populations of Google searchers. We hope that this experimental release provides useful information.

For updates on swine flu and information on how to stay healthy during a disease outbreak, visit the CDC's swine flu site.

Posted by Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Software Engineers

The Yahoo! Query Language lets you query, filter, and join data across any web data source or service on the web. Using our YQL web service, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint. YQL uses a SQL-like language because it is a familiar and intuitive method for developers to access data. YQL treats the entire web as a source of table data, enabling developers to select * from Internet.

Earlier this year we released Open Data Tables publicly for anyone to use to make data YQL-accessible, and today, as I write, there are seventy-some tables contributed to the community repository on github.

Today, the YQL team has taken the Open Data Table capabilities to the next level by adding a new element to the definition - Execute. The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement.

With Execute, developers now have full control of how the data is fetched into YQL and how it’s presented back to the user. With Open Data Tables, developers can build tables that manipulate, change, and sign the URLs to access almost any protected content, allowing YQL access and combining data across a variety of different authenticated services such as Netflix or Twitter. Developers can call multiple services and data sources within Execute to join and mashup data however they desire, letting Yahoo! do the work rather than their applications. Data can be tweaked and manipulated into an optimal format for applications to consume.

Execute elements run server-side JavaScript with E4X (native XML) support. This gives developers a fully functional language that web developers know, and lets them do anything they want with the data. We've added a few new global objects to the language to enable developers to: include JavaScript libraries and code from any URL; fetch data from any URL/web page; run other YQL commands; and perform data filtering and conversion.

Hello World example

Let’s take a look at our “Hello World” example to see how it works. Here’s a table that’s served up from http://yqlblog.net/samples/helloworld.xml :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<table xmlns="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/schema/table.xsd">
  <meta>
    <sampleQuery>select * from {table} where a='cat' and b='dog';</sampleQuery>
  </meta>
  <bindings>
    <select itemPath="" produces="XML">
      <urls>
        <url>http://fake.url/{a}</url>
      </urls>
      <inputs>
        <key id='a' type='xs:string' paramType='path' required="true" />
        <key id='b' type='xs:string' paramType='variable' required="true" />
      </inputs>
      <execute><![CDATA[
        // Your server-side javascript goes here
        response.object = <item>
          <url>{request.url}</url>
          <a>{a}</a>
          <b>{b}</b>
        </item>;
      ]]></execute>
    </select>
  </bindings>
</table>

The heart of this simple example is the “execute” element. This accepts various input values from the YQL engine (as determined by the “inputs” element) and needs to produce data to be returned. In our example, we’re just creating a simple XML document using E4X and returning it with the values “a” and “b” from the YQL statement.

To use a single open data table in YQL you need to prepend a “use” statement before actually running a query on the table. So sending the following YQL statement to our web service, or pasting it into the console, will import the data table above and run it:

use "http://yqlblog.net/samples/helloworld.xml";

select * from helloworld where a="cat" and b="dog";

To try it, follow this link.

Other examples of YQL Execute

Here are some other examples to give you a taste of the new capabilities in Open Data Tables with Execute:

* CSS selectors for HTML - a CSS selector table for getting data from HTML pages

use "http://yqlblog.net/samples/data.html.cssselect.xml";
select * from data.html.cssselect;
Try CSS selectors.

* Unified web+image search - perform a BOSS search that also returns an image from the BOSS image search for the same site and query term in a single result set

use 'http://yqlblog.net/samples/search.imageweb.xml' as searchimageweb;
select * from searchimageweb where query='pizza'
Try Unified web+image search.

* Social application install differ - get all the apps that you and your friends have installed, see who has what.

use "http://yqlblog.net/samples/social.friendapps.xml";
select * from social.friendapps;
Try Social application install differ.

* Search position finder - augments BOSS search results with a rank number so you can then find where certain sites appear

use 'http://yqlblog.net/samples/searchrank.xml' as searchrank;
select * from searchrank where query='pizza' and dispurl like '%pizzahut%'
Try Search position finder.

* Celebrity birthday list - combines BOSS with IMDB HTML data to give you a list of birthdays and bios on a given day (today by default).

use "http://yqlblog.net/samples/celeb.birthdays.xml";
select * from celeb.birthdays;
Try Celebrity birthday list.

* Flickr frob converter - given a user's frob it gives you a Flickr auth key for getting to private data. This one requires HTTPS connections to YQL to keep your Flickr app id secret.

use "http://yqlblog.net/samples/flickr.auth.frob.xml";
desc flickr.auth.frob;
Try Flickr frob converter.

* Search the Netflix catalog - shows the power of being able to sign requests in the table's JavaScript using an external library. The table takes the CK and CKS for Netflix and performs a 2-legged signed request to search their catalog. You can then join or filter this data across other web services.

use "http://yqlblog.net/samples/netflix.catalog.xml";
desc netflix.catalog;
Try Search the Netflix catalog.

If you'd like to learn more, please delve into the documentation and start creating your own open data tables with Execute!

Jonathan Trevor
YQL Lead

One of the most frequent complaints I hear about YSlow grades is, "Some of these performance rules do not apply for my website." Most web developers want to evaluate site performance according to their own specific design and content criteria. For example: Not all sites use content delivery networks (CDNs). With the latest release of YSlow, it becomes really easy for web developers to configure their own rule sets and get relevant grades for their pages. We've also incorporated nine new rules, in addition to the previous thirteen. The ability to create your own rule set for performance testing is a next step towards opening up YSlow for developers to create and share their own rules.

Improving page performance sometimes involves reducing page weight. Images are one of the biggest contributors to page weight for most sites. Our performance rules talk about optimizing images to improve performance. Most often, in-depth knowledge of tools like Photoshop and other design tools is required to publish highly optimized images. We've removed the pain of optimization in this version of YSlow by integrating with Smush.it. Smush.it finds all images on your web page and applies the right techniques to optimize them without visual quality loss. Developers can also download smushed images in a zip format.

The new look is designed to encourage developers to evaluate their webpage performance more closely and pay attention to small details, like making sure they've used small favicons that are cacheable. Our goal is a better, faster web experience for all.

If you have any questions or feedback, we encourage you to join the conversation on the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance group. We look forward to your continued interest and enthusiasm – stay tuned, there's still a lot more to come.

Pramod Khincha
Exceptional Performance

It’s been 100 days into President Barack Obama’s administration – this week also marks the first 100 days of an Obama search extravaganza. Users all over the world have turned to Yahoo! Search to learn about the stimulus plan, the housing bill, the First Family, and even Bo, the First Dog.

From the beginning, it was clear this president was as popular online as he was in initial voting. The Obama administration caused major spikes on Yahoo! Search – during the inauguration in January, people looked for ways to watch the event online and see moments from Obama’s inauguration speech.

Inauguration search spikes on Yahoo! also captured quirky details like “Aretha Franklin inauguration hat” (and “Aretha Franklin bow”), “inauguration luncheon recipes,” and “who designed Michelle Obama’s dress.”

The first lady herself causes some of the most amusing queries, including the persistent search for “Michelle Obama pregnant.” (She isn’t, as far as we know.) People want to know everything from “Michelle Obama dress size” and “Michelle Obama wedding ring” to “how tall is Michelle Obama.”

Searches on President Obama’s personable style can cause some entertaining search spikes too – people wanted to know “how to make Obama Hope poster” and what are “Barack Obama’s NCAA picks.” The Obamas’ fitness regime has not gone unnoticed by searchers as they looked for ‘Obama shirtless” and “Michelle Obama arm.”

Queries on Yahoo! Search about the Obama administration also reflected on the seriousness of current economic times. By far, Obama’s stimulus plan was the most popular Obama-related searches on Yahoo!; top search terms included “Obama stimulus plan details,” “economic stimulus plan,” and “what is in the stimulus bill.” We even saw searches for “economic stimulus song.” In April, the G20 Summit heightened interest in Obama’s economic plan. Housing and mortgage terms related to Obama’s housing bill also caused major spikes in Yahoo! Search.

Just as Obama’s domestic economic policies have caused major search spikes, his work abroad was something that people search for on Yahoo! Obama’s overseas visits to France and Afghanistan, as well as his unannounced stop in Iraq, all were buzzing on Yahoo! Search. The graph below shows Yahoo! web search spikes of foreign leaders (and spouses) that Obama visited during his trips.

One of Obama’s interactions with a foreign leader caused major spikes in Yahoo! search: “Did President Obama bow to the Saudi King” during the G-20? Searchers urgently wanted to know. But does it really matter if Obama bowed? That’s a State secret.

If the administration’s online campaign is any indication, they know people are looking for information and they’re serving it up - makinghomeaffordable.gov, financialstability.gov, and recovery.gov are all new government websites that saw search spikes in the last 100 days. The sheer volume of searches related to the Obama presidency so far suggests that this administration is facing an internet-savvy constituency who follows their every move from the Web – and they’re doing it with Yahoo! Search.

Eugenia Chien and Andrea Sandke

Yahoo! Search