Data and Technology: Google

Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Google Analytics Plugin - Very useful one

Google Analytics (GA) is invaluable when you need to slice and dice web traffic data along numerous dimensions. For example, by date, time, location just to name few measuring visits, vistiors, pageviews, etc. For full list of possible combinations take a look at this documentation.

While many business users and SEO/SEM analyts use GA on regular basis to manage their Internet Marketing spend and improve site traffic for better ROI, they can chart a single measure for different segments and analyse one metric at a time. Many a time users download their data from adwords or get GA data through their in-house API setup. With almost all business users having used Excel as one of their main analytical tool, they prefer it over other tools (either in-house or 3rd party). Also, as quickly as things change in Internet Marketing (IM) world, some quick analysis business user can do on their own allows them to respond to quickly to market changes. You may find bullet 3 and 4 in this article from Avinash Kaushik relevant.

Google NS Individual Search Box

Today, while searching for "cygwin" keyword I was presented with results that caught my eye. The first result had its own search box. See picture below. Had anyone seen this before? I liked the feature and pretty handy if you are looking for a specific information from a specific site. I entered "latest version" and hit "Search cygwin.com" that showed search entry "latest version site:cygwin.com" in the next search. Nice.

Other posts that may be of interest:
1. Best Google home page logos
2. Better quicker SEM ROI
3. 99 bottles of beer in different laguages

Cheers,
Shiva

Quick ROI for SEM (Adwords) Defined

SEM or Internet paid advertisement or PPC or Adwords or what ever one may call, has been on high growth rate for many years now and has shown that it will continue to grow in the near future with the potential to grab market share from other advertisement channels. This has implications on all companies that would like to have their products or services advertised. By quickly responding to the market changes and being nimble, they can effectively spend their marketing dollars with positive ROI.

Though I use Google Adwords in the following explaination, you can replace the same logic for Yahoo and MSN. I assume that you are somewhat familiar with natural search, paid search, clicks, impressions and related; and what they mean.

Related posts: Quick ROI forecasting technique

Useful SEM SEO Links

Some of very useful links related to SEM and SEO fields.

Google Adwords

Official Blog
Adwords Tools

Google Analytics (GA)

Google

Google Labs

Google Analytics Data Retriever (API) - SEM, SEO

Google Analytics should be an integral part of any company's marketing data analysis strategy that plays in SEM, SEO field. Not too long ago Google released API for their Analytics and one can use this data or reports to compliment their in-house data analysis.

Here I have provided a small utility program that can be used to retrieve most popular six (6) reports and have used similar utilities that I have built to dump the data into MySQL data warehouse for much bigger data sets.

The application has two Perl modules (GAProfile.pm and GAReport.pm) and a main program (ga_report_retriever.pl). GAProfile.pm module is used to authenticate your account and get the auth_code that will be used in the subsequent calls to GA to get reports. GAReport.pm module is used to pull the report and dump important dimension and metrics to standard output. Put both these modules in the same directory (or copy them to directory in the path of PERL5LIB) as the main program and run it. To get different report, make a change in "ga_report_retriever.pl" passing the name of the report.

Before you start using the GA API, you may want to go through the documentation.

At command prompt> ./ga_report_retriever.pl

Google Docs Spreadsheet - Better access control needed

I use Google docs to maintain many documentations for a non-profit organization and this has been a very useful, money & time saving application. In my view, following three features will immediately enhance what is already a excellent collaborative product. These are low-hanging fruits.

User access control at worksheet level to view
Copying more than 1000 (one thousand cells) at a time
Multi-column sorting

In our non-profit organization we have multiple chapters controlling their own documents/ spreadsheets and some times there are situations where I would like to have a single spreadsheet but each work sheet is visible only to a particular chapter or member. For example, a common spreadsheet with 50 worksheets (one for each US state) should appropriately be visible to these chapters. A California chapter can view California worksheet only and not others.

Currently, I can control the editing access through "Protect Sheet" but not the viewing. See below.

Best of Google homepage logos over the years

Google modifies their home page by including birthdays of some major personalities around the world or major events. Here are some of the best, unique and presented in more than one country. The list below is not any particular order.

2009.05.20 - Charles Darwin Birthday

2009.11.13 - Water on Moon found

2009.10.02 - Mahatma Gandhi