Free Real-time Website Tracking with Google Analytics

Google Analytics has been the leader of web analytics software and services for a while already, but there was one area where they suffered from the competition: real time statistics. It is an exceptionally useful tool for those who participate in the Google AdSense context advertising program, and need to measure the instant effect of the new posts, interface changes, new program launches on their sites.

Until recently, you were not able to see how many visitors are visiting your site at that particular moment, what pages they were visiting, where they were coming from and so on. Yesterday, September 29, Google announced adding new features to Analytics, including real time tracking.

Through their own words:

The web is getting faster, and not just the speed of the pages, but also the speed of change. Before, it was fine to build a website and modify it only when new products were launched. All of us avid Analytics users know that’s just not good enough. We need to be constantly on the lookout for problems and opportunities.

Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.

You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by clicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time reports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in the updated interface next week). You will have access to Real-Time reports if you are an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to a profile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.

Note that while the features were enabled for multiple users already, everybody will have eventually the access to Real-Time in coming weeks. If you can’t wait, you can sign up for early access through the following link: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/.

Real-Time Analytics allows you to instantly track the efficacy of social media campaigns. By tagging links that you share on Facebook and Twitter with tags related to your marketing campaign, you can track the exact impact of those links. If you need to know how to do that, here's the link.

While the free real-time stats for Google Analytics remain free for its users, this week it also introduced Google Analytics Premium, its first paid offering for larger websites. While Google's free offering tops out its data collection at 10 million website visitors per month, its new paid plan offers more data collection, additional modeling tools and service support. When Google called this service "Premium", it wasn't kidding. The service costs $150,000 per year--far out of the reach of most small and midsize businesses (SMB), according to Forrester analyst Joseph Stanhope. But for the large businesses it should be an extremely robust tool. One feature alone--downloadable unsampled reports--sounds temptingly like it would let you download your own data about your Web properties from Google. The 24-hour live technical support is attractive--especially to the less tech-savvy at larger corporations who may miss out on key data with the current Google Analytics.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-analytics-offers-real-time-tracking-now/

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/240931/google_offers_realtime_site_analytics.html

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/29/technology/google_real_time/

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393902,00.asp#fbid=gItZQaRm3xE

Read More

Google Instant Search and Marketing Concerns

Google recently introduced their “Instant Search” feature which starts to populate search results the instant you start typing into the search box. At the same time, Google suggests alternate search terms as you type to help narrow your search without forcing you to enter entire search phrases.

The main idea behind this new feature is to save users a few seconds on each search and cut down on misspellings for search terms, business names or product names. Users may not notice much difference in their overall experience, however, for small businesses and online entrepreneurs, this new search method carries a few interesting ramifications.

Since Google clearly ranks as the “900 lb. Gorilla” of the online marketing world, acting as de facto gateway to the Web for millions, any change to their system makes businesses nervous. Many have expressed concern that this latest change will force users of Google’s AdWords program, the search giant’s lucrative pay-per-click marketing arm, to pay for more expensive keywords.

They reason that since the most popular search terms appear in the search box first, and that most people will opt to accept Google suggestions, those most popular searches will carry the highest click prices. In other words, businesses that depend on Google to show their ads fear that Google will force them to pay more money by recommending more expensive keyword searches.

But that might not be a real future!

The suggested search term feature actually appeared on Google quite a while ago, and all that’s really changed is Google starts to display the actual search results AS you type. With the old 2-step process, Google made suggestions as you typed and then you clicked the search button to see the search results.

Instant Search just creates a FAST way to see the results for different search variations without forcing you to click the button each time to see those results. This process makes it simple to see the results, change your mind, and not wait for the results each time you change the phrase.

Most people always start with a broad search and then narrow it by including more descriptive terms (often called “long-tail” keywords) to better find what they want. This new process won’t change that.

In fact, it will give people more chances to refine their searches on-the-fly by providing Google more details of what they want. Instead of posing a threat, I believe this new Instant Search feature creates an opportunity for any business to perform high-speed market research to look for possible opportunities and trouble spots.

The following four steps will help any small business use Google’s new feature for instant results.

1. Go to Google and search for your business as if you were a consumer.

2. Make a note of the keyword suggestions Google offers as you type.

3. See if those suggestions give you any ideas for your own marketing (since they should represent the most popular phrases).

4. Note which competitors show up and where you appear in relation to them.

These 4 simple steps make a great barometer for taking a read on your local market, fast.

Who appears consistently?

Who shows up hit-and-miss or every once in a while?

Who shows up in Google Maps?

If your competitors show up and you don’t, you’ve got some work to do!

Bottom line: as a small business, use Google’s new Instant Search to quickly get the big picture when it comes to your business, industry, and local competition.

Source and Additional Information:

 http://smallbusinessmarketingweekly.com/

http://www.webguild.org/20100909/google-instant-implications-for-users-advertisers-website-operators

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641319

Read More

How to Get Included in Google News

Google News can send tons of traffic and help you gather a lot of inbound links. Inclusion in Google News actually puts you far ahead of the general bloggers’ crowd and provides the worldwide exposure, validity, and media recognition. While it might be a challenging target, it is worth to strive and the results will be rewarding in terms of the blog visibility and eventually in related profits generation. For me, personally, it is probably a long way to go, since my some of the conditions, essential for consideration, are not in place. But, for you it might be just few steps ahead.

 

  

In this article by Ivan Strouchliak it is discussed the Google News editorial and technical requirements.

Editorial Guidelines

Content Requirements

Content must be 100% original. Google News does not support news scrapers. You can sign up for PR wires to track news updates from around the world (along with the clutter of press releases). Having buddies on the “inside” also goes a long way, since you can be the one to break hot stories (Search Engine Land, Wall Street Journal, etc).

Authors/Editors

Google requires more than one author for a website, so if you’re a one-man blog you won’t get into Google News. The number of authors/editors required is not specified, so all we can do is guess. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Round Table managed to get into Google News with five writers/editors and two featured writers, so you need at least several people.

Some forums state that the minimum required number of editors is three, but those are merely guesses.

Google News only includes sites that they perceive as operational organizations. This requires a clear editor/writer structure, author bios, company information, a physical address, phone numbers, etc. In short, it includes anything that shows you’re an operational publication that can produce consistent, high quality, fresh content.

Number of Articles Per Day (frequency)

There is no official statement on this from Google, but it’s obvious they want to see at least two to three quality articles per day.

Number of Articles on a Website

Just as with article frequency, there’s no word on this directly from Google. Common sense tells us, though, that you need a few hundred articles in the archive before they include you.

Content Format

Each article must have a clear title (more on titles in the technical section), author name and date of publication. It should also be a minimum of 200 to 300 words.

Ads

Google is 100 percent okay with ads on the site. In fact, it encourages all Google News publishers to use the AdSense Network. Advertisements also indicate that the site has visitors and a functional business model to support authors and continue publishing.

Multimedia

Google is okay with images within content, but does not allow content that consists of images only. The same goes for videos. You can include You Tube videos, but there must be words in an article to qualify it for Google News.

Overall, Google wants to see quality; this is probably the reason they have no clear qualifications. If a small publisher can contribute to the Google experience, Google editors will include that website, regardless of size.

Also keep in mind that once publisher is accepted in the index, everything else is handled by algorithms, without human input, so Google editors naturally want to make sure that the site will live up to the standards.

Article Titles

Titles should be news-like and clear. Browse CNN and the Wall Street Journal to get a feel for news headlines. They usually summarize content and include the names of the main players. Including names of companies will increase the likelihood of the article showing up for company specific searches (i.e. Google, Yahoo).

Title length should be between two and twenty-two words.

Date and time are prohibited in titles. If you’re using a content management system, you can disable that feature. Article titles should appear in both the <title> tag and somewhere on the page, for example <h1> of <h2> tags.

Google does not support the usage of the title as a link (the usual case on blogs), so you must disable this feature.

URLs

To be included in Google News, article URLs should follow Google News bot standards. URLs must be unique, and each unique URL must point to only one article. URLs must be permanent, without the use of session IDs. Google does not support dates in URLs, so set up your content management system to exclude dates.

Each URL must contain at least three digits. For example:

Bad:

www.site.com/news/article/54.html

Good:

www.site.com/news/article/547.html

www.site.com/news/article/4534343.html

Google cannot crawl articles that include a year in the URL.

URL Attributes that Prevent Crawling

Any of the URL attributes below will prevent the Google News bot from crawling your link:

• /board/ or /boards/
• /forum/ or /forums/
• /messageboard
• /showthread
• ?threadid= or &threaded
• Anything that is similar in nature

Google does not support news posted in a forum format. 

Template

Your website template should look like a news source. Milind Mody of eBrandz recommends staying away from a blog format.

JavaScript

Google News does not support JavaScript in any form, such as links, navigation or content hidden within a script.

Redirects

Google supports redirects, meaning you can plug content (like ads) in between Google News and your article. Guidelines include no session IDs (&ID=), use of 301s for permanent redirects and a minimal number of redirects to get from one page to another. Also set the redirect time period for a short amount of time and make sure that redirects don’t point to themselves.

Many companies show ads with delays before taking users to the actual article; this is why Google supports various redirects. 

To find out how the crawler would see a redirect, disable cookie, JavaScript and CSS support in your browser. You will probably see plain and ugly pages.

Frames

Frames are evil; don’t use frames. Sites that use frames call upon the dark forces from the depths of hell to be punished by low rankings and crawler problems.

Language

Google News supports only one language per page. The best code is UTF-8. Keep only one language version of the article on one page to avoid problems. If you support more than one language, you can contact the Google Team to be featured in other countries.

No Support

Google News does not support PDF articles and non-permanent content (content which sits on a URL but changes from time to time).

Google's news crawler can spider dynamically generated content, such as .php, .asp and others, but it can run into problems which can prevent articles from appearing on Google News. It recommends that you use static URLs rather than dynamic URLs, or set your content management system to produce static looking links.

If you must use both dynamic and static URLs, block the Google bot from accessing dynamic ones to avoid duplicate content penalties. You can block the Google bot in robot.txt file.

Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links

Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Its automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.

Snippets of Content

Google shows content snippets in search results with keyword occurrences. It requires sites to have NO content, other than the article, in an area between the title and content.

Registration and Subscription Content

If you run on subscription revenues, Google can add more ROI to your bottom line. There are three ways to handle this, but first you must allow Google in. The G-crawler has to see content to classify it, and pay-walls prevent this. You can work around this issue by putting in an exception for the Google bot.

• First, make sure the Google bot is allowed to crawl your pages (robot.txt).
• Second, configure your servers to serve registration when Google bot comes from 66.249.64.0/20.

Once you let Google bot crawl your subscription pages, those pages will be featured on Google News. From that point on there are several options:

1. First click free. With this option visitors can reads full versions of your articles when and only when they come from Google News/Web Search. All other clicks on the site lead to the subscription page. Google claims they’ve increased subscription rates for some publishers with this method, and I believe it works best.
   Once users read full articles, they have a clear idea of the quality of your articles, which is better than any marketing message. For example, from time to time I read tech-related Wall Street Journal articles and I am often amazed at their quality, depth and level of connections with stakeholders in the industry. After reading one of their articles I am more likely to subscribe then after reading only a small summary.
   You can contact Google to arrange the first click free feature. Please note that only Google News/Google Search users will have access to the full article.
2. A subscription page. This one is plain and simple. When users click on the link they are directed to subscription page. This is not effective in getting more subscriptions.
3. Snippets of the page. You can also feature a partial snippet of the article with an offer to subscribe.

Feeds

Google does not require RSS feeds, but you can definitely benefit from having one. Feedburner offers free feeds, and all blog platforms produce RSS feeds by default.

Read More