New G Analytics
Adam April 16th, 2011
The new face lifted version of Google Analytics is out. I can’t say yet how much I like it or don’t as it’s still early on but here’s my initial reaction.
My first impressions are that I don’t care for it. But it has to be pointed out that I have that feeling because I’m familiar with the old analytics. I liked the compact overview of the listing of my sites and a quickly viewable percentage change in the last month (or week/year). This new view has the sites less compacted and a lot of scrolling has to be done to get to where you want to be at. I know, I know, there’s a search function but I’m more likely to scroll and not leave the mouse for the keyboard to find the site listing I’m looking for. I’m sure the big G has done analytics on it’s analytics which I can only assume that shows most people using analytics probably have one site they are tracking. I’m in the rare scenario of having 50+ analytics accounts which I watch and manage on a daily/weekly basis!
I can say that for my scenario of having multiple sites on one account, I’m glad that my clients sitting over my shoulder at my desk / computer don’t see my other clients stats. Since I manage 50+ analytics sites there’s many sites that are seasonal, that don’t get any of my services to boost their traffic, are down for various reasons (redesigns, new sites, and clients whom don’t like to pay bills and have had their site shut down), or they aren’t paying attention to their website that have negative growth shown. That doesn’t look that great when a client quickly sees a glimpse of the overview with red lettering (indicating a drop) on any of the accounts. Since I’m completely open with all my clients I can explain as to what’s happening but if they don’t ask and just assume then you never know what they are thinking…
So over all this is a pretty basic review of the new analytics version but it’s still fresh and I haven’t had too much time to get to know her 
Check back with me as I write more about my feelings on the new look of this ever so important tool that any and every website should use.
How do you feel about the new look? Like it or hate it?
EDIT:
As I play around with Analytics it’s obvious many things are missing. The biggest to me is the percent differences between dates ie. last day/week/month/year (d/w/m/y) compared to this current d/w/m/y in percentage reporting. But I’ve found the answer… it’s coming. Read here
April Fools
Adam April 2nd, 2011
I’ve got a tradition of putting up some of the past April Fools jokes around the web that I find funny or interesting. Here’s my list from this year (keep in mind I’m a geek).
Google’s Gmail Motion BETA
Autocompleter Position 
SEOMoz FutureRank 
Carsonified Double SEO
My favorite > Hulu Old School
Big G’s Experimental +1 Feature for Search
Adam March 30th, 2011
The new Google +1 experiment (the blue box and the “You +1′d this” above) looks very familiar to another, big social networking company’s button. I wonder who?
It seems to me that Google is really trying to get in on the “I approve this link or page” deal and that isn’t a bad thing. Since Google has been changing some things up ie. new account / services bar at the top of Google search pages, new Google profile pages, heavier integration into the Youtube profiles, integration with Twitter, and much more, we’ll see the social impact of our daily lives and online habits playing in to the results for search engines.
This is big for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as I can see the traditional ways of getting web sites high rankings ie. good, unique content, an good user experience, back links, meta tags, title tags, optimized pages and such being put along side the social links and likes. I’m not sure yet (and I think it’s to early to tell) what kind of weight these social links have but I’ve certainly been noticing them in my search results. I’ve especially noticed the “Steve shared this link” on some of my search engine results pages (SERPs) and that’s gotten some sites higher in the rankings then some other traditional methods even when I thought that the link that was shared didn’t have to do with my search keywords. An example for my Google account and the SERPs for the keyword “wordpress”. Normally I’d be looking for the wordpress official site which a friend did share the link to but further down the list of results I see on of my hosting companies pages “we host wordpress” which is definitely not what I’m looking for. I follow that host on Twitter in order to see server downtime information in real time should there ever be an issue (there hasn’t been anything for years by the way).
As I see it, social is here to stay and it’s something that has to be embraced instead of avoided. It’s only going to get deeper and deeper in our online experience. Using that information securely, privately will, in the test of time, decide which way the people will go to and adapt to. I’m very curious about people exploiting the social aspect though. It’s time consuming but it isn’t tough to set up dozens or hundreds of fake online accounts and if someone is willing to take on that kind of management then I think there’s room for the system to be gamed.
I’m contemplating doing an experiment of my own with a Twitter account. I did like to see if following a ton of people, which will eventually get tons of followers back or using web based software to manage or drop people my account is following but don’t follow back ie. Flashtweet and others) then posting links to websites for SEO purposes. Would those sites get highly improved SERPs ranks? Is the social factor a huge factor for Google or a small part?
Thanks to my client Tyent Universe for use of the screen shot of their search result.
