Google+... that’s been around a while now hasn’t it? It’s hardly taken off as a social network but recently it seems Google have their sights set much higher than that. They know that they can’t compete with Facebook, but then they don't need to. Google are still the most used search engine in the world, they have more traffic than Facebook anyway, so why shouldn’t their social network revolve around that aspect of their platform? Well, Google have slowly been revealing that it does, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a good thing for your business. 

Combined with Google+ Business Pages, the whole Google platform can deliver more for you. It only takes 5 minutes to create a page so there’s really no reason not to. But what exactly will you get out of it?

Be Found Instantly

Not only are Google+ Business Pages another great channel to broadcast your business through, they are also an instant access point for users to reach you as a brand. For example, since the business pages went online big brands like Pepsi, McDonalds and Lexus have all signed up to the service. Users who want information or the latest news from those companies merely have to type + and the name of the company into the Google search bar.

Try it out now and you’ll see that as you type instant search literally offers you the Google+ page of that business, giving users an extremely fast way to access your social stream.

Obviously, if you’ve got a page Google will find that anyway but the Google+ integration with the search engine is just so fast and slick. It’s a service only Google can truly offer within the confines of their own platform and as users become accustomed to this unique Google offering (as we have done with so many others) it could become a winning feature.

Increased Search Ranking

Perhaps the single most relevant thing that will attract those of you who still mostly think of Google as a search provider is the ability of Google+ to improve your search rankings. There’s a new system at work to integrate with Google+ and it works like this...

Say, for example, I +1 something, a page, a product, a business (the +1 system can be integrated all over the web just like a Facebook ‘like’) and then you do a search for it. Because we’re friends (hello!), on Google+ your search results will have my relevant +1’s displayed. This means that users of Google get advice from their friends without even having to ask for it. An absolutely crucial marketing tool if you have a loyal fan base, allowing it to grow by subconscious word of mouth.

Additionally a friend of codegent who knows the guys at Google rather well recently told us that your Google+ page will be (can we say artificially?) promoted up the search algorithm for searches against your brand name. Its a very easy way to boost your search position and dominance of the first page of results.

Access to Your Customers Zero Moment of Truth

There’s been a long standing phrase in the marketing world, “moment of truth”. Traditionally this was broken down into two parts; the First Moment of Truth, when a customer sees a product they like and begins to gravitate towards it and the Second Moment of Truth, when a customer attains said product and uses it, reinforcing their belief that the product was as good as they believed it to be.

This traditional concept of these two moments is 100% accurate and has been proven over billions of sales of products worldwide since the dawn of the modern advertising agency. However, thanks to the connected world we now live in Google has assessed that there is another, more important, Moment of Truth which occurs through social media and dictates a huge proportion of peoples’ spending habits. As we now do more shopping online than anywhere else this makes perfect sense, why would we go out to do research when we have the largest compendium of human knowledge just a mouse click away? Not only that, but the benefit of the experience of millions of other customers.

This, is the Zero Moment of Truth. Gone are the days when you had to get a product home and try it out or luckily come across a good tester model of it in a shop to find out it’s real value to you. Social media doesn’t just drive peoples’ lives socially, though the name may allude to that. In reality Social media drives peoples’ opinions of everything, from football matches, to movies, to physical products. So if I were to be torn between two equally popular products, between Samsung and LG for example, not knowing what to do I might look to their social media pages. If one were to have several million more fans than the other it would certainly seem that their customers had a reason for acting in such a way and alter my perception.

That’s a high level example, but it can be equally important on a small scale, for a single product or campaign behind that product. If you publish a post (and there are over a billion a day on Google+) related to your product and it catches the right eyes it will spread. Knowledge of your product will expand and the hits on both your Google+ business page and that products own page online will increase, potentially exponentially. Many users will be experiencing a Zero Moment of Truth, proof by a large body of their peers that the product is good, appreciated, interesting.

It’s impossible to emphasise the importance of this effect to you and your business but Google are helping with that one too. They’ve introduced a feature called Ripples, which allows business people, marketers and general speculators to view the effect a post had, a sort of butterfly effect on Google+. Your post flapped it’s wings here and then what? You can see where it spread, to which users, how it spread on from them and the impact it had on your site traffic.The ramifications of this type of awareness are astonishing, allowing marketers to tailor their posts to mimic their most effective campaigns.

The simplest way I can summarise is - get your business on Google+. There’s never any telling how a new service or product will pan out but Google+ has a lot to offer you right now and you shouldn’t miss out.

If you’d like to know more about the Zero Moment of Truth and how it really drives your customers then Google literally wrote the book on it, which is a free download in all the common eBook formats and can be found at www.zeromomentoftruth.com.

It seems the phrase "in the cloud" is used with great enthusiasm nowadays by just about every technology company around. Obviously the thinking is that people will respond with as much excitement at the idea. However, working in the tech industry it's become clear to me that only others in my line of work fully understand "the cloud" what working in the cloud means and what it can do for you.

So I'm going to take it upon myself this month to give a brief overview of cloud services, what they are, what they can do and what ones might be useful to you at home or work for everyday purposes.

So what is the cloud?

Honestly, it's tough to say exactly what the cloud is as the term is bandied around so much now and with various meanings. Boiling it down to the basic idea, "working in the cloud" is the facility to work online, with the item you're working on never really existing on the local machine but instead safely stored elsewhere. This gives you the useful ability to access your files from any computer as the machine you're working on is irrelevant as long as you're connected to the web.

As a quick aside I just want to point out that true "cloud computing" rather than "working in the cloud" means that a computer elsewhere does the brunt of the work for you, releiving the load on your machine. On an ongoing basis cloud computing like this is continuing to grow and will mean even low-end machines can run CPU and GPU intensive applications because all that power is coming from another machine, somewhere else in the world. Perhaps you'll even be able to get simple and cheap set-top boxes for your HDTV to allow tasks like this, much like the new service onlive does for gaming.

What services are out there and how can they help me? Overall there are loads, so I'm just going to cover a few of the big ones which are hugely popular and have practical everyday uses.

General Office Work

We all know what this means, documents, spreadsheets, the daily neccesities. There are two major cloud services that allow you to do all of this and luckily they're both free!

First off let's start with the market standard for editing your office documents, Microsoft Office, which has a really fantastic cloud based version called Office Live. Now Microsoft weren't the first to offer a cloud based Office alternative, they somehow let Google beat them to it but I'll get to that later. What they do have now though is a truly viable alternative to the full Microsoft Office Suite for desktop systems, which runs right in your browser. How do you get it? Go to www.live.com and sign in, it's likely you already have an account anyway as they have so many other online services. If you've been tolive.com before you may not have even noticed Office Live but hold your mouse over Skydrive and you'll get the option to start a new word, excel or powerpoint document. You can also click on your documents folder and view any documents you already have. I wont go into the specifics of what you can do with Word, Excel and Powerpoint as you probably already know, what you get here is a basic level of functionality which is instantly recognisable and usable.

So how does Office Live work seamlessly in the cloud? Well if you're on any computer at all you can browse to the site and use it. Your document is saved to the skydrive so you can log in somewhere else and carry on later. If you've got office 2010 then you can hook it up to your windows live account and work directly on documents stored on the skydrive too but with full desktop fuctionality. Lastly, if you have a Windows Phone then Office mobile on that also syncs to the skydrive and lets you work on those documents in the cloud too, so however you work and from whatever machine you can use Office Live.

Now onto the biggest competitor and the guys who very much got a head start in this arena, Google, with their offering of Google Docs. Google docs is over 5 years old now and like almost every other Google service is wildly popular. It offers much the same suite of services as Office Live, with a couple of differences.

How do you get it? Simple, go to www.google.com and sign in with your Google account. Then click Documents in the Google menu bar at the top of your browsing area. From here you're taken to a view which allows you to see all the documents you already have and arrange them by last viewed, date, etc. There's a handily big create button which allows you to select a kind of document to create and start from scratch, similar to Office Live you've got Document, Spreadsheet and Presentation types, which have nice basic functionalities much like Microsoft's offering. With Google docs you can also create forms and drawings too, which is a nice addition, they're pretty basic too but very useful, the drawing tool for example allows you to create basic sketches in 2D or 3D environments.

So how does Google Docs work seamlessly in the cloud? Just like Office live you can browse to the site and use it from any computer at all. You're document is saved with basically every edit you make, almost per letter in fact. So you can just close your browser and carry on when logging in elsewhere later. There's not a downloadable app for Google Docs, Google don't try to compete with Microsoft on the desktop Office software front. Google docs is entirely cloud based for home computers, so it's browser only. On your mobile handset it's also easy to access through the browser and works great on Android mobiles and tablets or iOS phones and pads. If you're on and Android device there is of course a docs app, making it even easier.

One final difference between Office Live and Google Docs is Office Live's inclusion of OneNote, Microsoft's handy alternative to opening a full office doc when all you want are a few notes. In the browser you can click to create a new notebook. You can then do this every time or open an existing notebook and just add new pages of notes, Windows Phone syncs this too, in fact it is the note taking app for that smartphone platform, so any notes you take on your phone always exist in the cloud. Finally Office 2010's desktop version sits OneNote in your system tray so you can call it up, jot a note and then hide it again quickly, syncing to the skydrive the whole time of course.

So why did I leave OneNote's cloud feature's last to mention? Because I'm about to talk about another great note taking app which is a good alternative if you don't need full office functionality but rather just cloud based brain dumps. It's simpler than Office Live or Google Docs but that's the point, some people will prefer simplicity, so here it is... Evernote!

Evernote has been around a few years now and there's a version of the app for all the major smart phone platforms as well as Mac and Windows. There's also a browser based "web clipper" as they call it. Evernote isn't comprehensive like the other two offerings, it aims to be a cloud based memory for you basically and it does it very well.

So how do you get it? Go to www.evernote.com and sign up for an account basically. From there you can start using the web clipper straigh away to jot notes that are saved in your account or add a whole webpage you want to read later to a note. Then, when you're out and about download the version for your smart phone too and you can do a lot more stuff like snap a photo which will sync to your Evernote account or add a document like a travel itinerary or map as a note. Best of all, the basic functions of evernote are free, you can get a premium version with more online space, note revision histories and a few more extras but the basic functionality will be enough for most private or business users.

So, onto another type of cloud service...

Basic, (no nonsense) Cloud Storage

The premise of this category is online storage for all your files, of any kind, so not just documents but whatever you want really. Ideally this should happen seamlessly and without your knowledge so you can just rely on it and get your files from anywhere, whenever you like. There are loads of these kind of services out there really but I'm just going to cover two which are widely considered the best.

Firstly Dropbox is probably the best known of the bunch and is just really smooth and simple, even for the novice user. So where do you get it?www.dropbox.com of course. Once you've created your dropbox account then download the client. You can get it for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Blackberry OS and the install process is simple all round. After install sign in using the client and it will ask you to choose a folder on the local machine to be your dropbox folder, from this point on anything you add to this folder will be synced online.

What this fundamentally means is that if you install the client on each computer you use there will be a folder on all your computers which is always the same, all your documents on all your computers, handy right? So what if you're on a computer you shouldn't really be installing things on? Don't worry, you can log into your account on the website too and download any of your synced files and folders directly onto that computer, then when you're done with them upload via the website to update the files again. It's not as seamless but really does give you everywhere access to your stuff. Dropbox gives you 2Gb of online space for files but you can get an extra 250Mb by referring someone, up to a total of 8Gb for free. There's also premium options so you can pay for more space in staggered amounts or a get a huge, business size Dropbox.

Okay, so what's the alternative I mentioned earlier? Well it's another Microsoft product called Windows Live Mesh. Noticing the Windows Live theme among their products? Microsoft have been terrible at unifying their products in the past but in the last few years the Windows Live brand has been pretty well integrated if not marketed. As such this service ties in with the Office Live service I mentioned earlier, using the same account.

So how do you get it? Well there are versions available for Windows and Mac which you can download by logging into your account on www.live.comholding your cursor over the windows live logo and selecting the downloads option. Like hiding stuff don't they! Set up is easy, it's the standard Microsoft Live installer and will appear in your start menu or applications folder after that. The first time you run it you select a folder to sync and after that it does exactly that, syncs whatever you put in that folder to your skydrive and to whatever other computers have Live Mesh installed, Live Mesh can actually sync multiple folders which gives you pretty good felxibility. It's completely seamless like Dropbox, occuring in the background so all your files are always there, whatever computer you're on. If you're on a computer that doesn't have Live Mesh installed then you can also access your files through the www.live.com site in your browser by looking through your Skydrive page and downloading them and uploading files there. This merges well with Office Live as I mentioned before as if any of the files are spreadsheets, documents or presentations you can start editing them right there in the browser.

So there you have it, a few options to get you into the world of working in the cloud. As cloud computing is a huge growth market at the moment there are plenty more options out there but hopefully these productivity options ideal for personal and business use will get you started.

This week the world’s favourite micro-blogging site Twitter announced that it’s crossed the 100 Million users mark. Quite an achievement for any online business and let us not forget that Twitter is a business. Their most recent round of venture capital funding will leave their value at 8 Billion dollars, but where’s the money coming from to justify that value?

Well as we all know, Twitter currently makes no money, it’s free to users and is a bottomless pit for the aforementioned funding. So what are the market speculators valuing at 8 Billion dollars? The site and all its posts? The technology behind the service itself? No, of course not. That myriad of information (purely narcissistic, or otherwise) although interesting is worth nothing, even the news reported on Twitter is usually a short version of what exists elsewhere in a much more readable form. Even the infrastructure itself over the years of R&D and redesign is probably worth somewhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million at the most (although the 24/7 running costs must be remarkable).

So what’s worth 8 Billion US Dollars to the many investors who keep Twitter running? You.
Quick calculation $8,000,000,000 ÷ 100,000,000 = $80

That’s pretty reasonable! Each user being worth $80 is a great deal, for it is you that they own. Unlike Facebook, to date Twitter seems to remain relatively unscathed in this regard. Facebook has come under plenty of fire for user privacy issues in the last 12 months. Mostly this is because Facebook is very clear that the user is their particular commodity, but people don’t like being seen this way. Facebook knows all about you, what you like, where you go, who you talk to.

Twitter is no different. It knows who you follow and therefore what you like. It knows who you tweet to and even where you are when you tweet. The reason it has escaped criticism is largely because it hasn’t taken advantage of this. Yet! But at some point the investors will want their $8 Billion back. Thus the conversation has been sparked, how long will it be until Twitter introduces advertising to their service?

On a wider level this has happened on similar services and successfully too. Google for example saturate you in advertising throughout all their services. They are so good at it though, the advertising itself is so subtle and so well targeted, that users rarely find it irritating. However, they achieve this in much the same way as Facebook, that being collection of personal data. Google know all about you, it’s just not as obvious as Facebook, who are recently the whipping boy for privacy issue gripes.

In fact, when Google bought out YouTube for close to $1.7 Billion in late 2006 they began the process of heavily commercialising the site. At first this resulted in the usual condemnation of any change but has been largely embraced and accepted by the sites users. And no doubt it’s this advertising that brings in the much needed running capital to ensure a site as complex as YouTube keeps going.

The fact is social media companies treat the user as a product, that’s just an underlying principle of online business. If you (the consumer) appear to be getting something for free, then you are the product. Overall, we have to recognise that this is a trend which is prevalent online now, the long game is king.

As members of this industry the strategy of these companies should be obvious to us, find a niche and populate that niche with great content for free. This will draw thousands, millions or even hundreds of millions of users to you. Once traction is that high, sell these users (or at least access to their prefrontal cortex’s) to the highest bidders.

Sounds horrific, doesn’t it but it’s actually not always a bad thing. The reason Facebook came under such scrutiny was their willingness to share user’s details with partners by default. If user’s have the ability to control what’s shared then bad press can be easily prevented, unfortunately Facebook learned this the hard way. That said, the other usage of our information by Facebook was internal, Facebook’s servers simply determined which, of their myriad of available adverts, were relevant to us. This actually works and personally I find it’s always showing me things I’m genuinely interested in. Google’s extensive algorithms seem to do much the same, with plenty of advertising, but all of it related to the searches I’ve made and hence, things I’m interested in.

We can only hope that lessons learned by others are taken into account when Twitter inevitably begins leveraging their huge user base for something more profitable. If adverts appear in my feeds which are relevant to me I should be happy, right? It’s a balance of course; most users accept that adverts are needed to support their favourite sites and services. This is still a learning period and both sides need to forge some tolerance. Users need to understand that who they are and what they like is up for grabs and online services need to understand there’s a limit to this, users will only tolerate being owned by their favourite service if that trust isn’t abused.

The number of people using social platforms as a source of information is constantly increasing and search engines are understandably trying to keep up with this trend and benefit from it. Google knows that if they finally get their social strategy right they will become an integrated search and social platform with new revenue opportunities.

So, after some not so successful attempts at going social with Google Buzz, Wave and Orkut, Google has launched its latest new social concept, Google +1. But what is so special about this new development and how much of an impact may it potentially have on our existing search behaviour?

Google +1 has been considered by many to be a copycat of the Facebook model. Similarly to Facebook, once you are logged into your Google account, you can “like”...or “+1” in this case, recommended websites, blogs, advertisements etc to make them visible to others.

Unlike Facebook you are not restricted to sharing content with friends; you can exchange +1 content with all of your Google social connections, including people from the outside your network of friends (Google social connections includes everyone in your Gmail chat list, all Google Contacts and people you are following in Google Reader and Google Buzz). This makes the Google community more impersonal compared to Facebook particularly as interaction finishes the moment a recommendation is made. With Google +1 none of your social connections are able to comment further on your +1 content, as can be done on Facebook.

However Google’s trump card is that +1 content is remembered by the search engine and gets displayed in SERPs in a real-time. This means that any +1 content is highlighted in your search results allowing you to quickly identify content recommended by your connections. Google believes that the +1 function will earn more credit than its previous social initiatives as the recommendations show the opinion of people you know and trust, as opposed to authorities that aim to influence your opinion.

But do we really need our peers’ recommendations in our search results? So far Google has earned its credit and become trusted to deliver reliable and accurate search results. Is socially influenced search really going to improve the existing mechanism?

My concern is that our search results will become cluttered with opinions from our social connections and there should be an option to turn them off. Imagine all of those +1 buttons popping up in your search results telling you what all the people from your contact list think. Could they pose a threat to the reliability and clarity of Google search? As much as you might feel that you are happy to rely on your peers’ opinion, at some point you might need more viable information i.e. based on factual or aggregated global measurements.

Google +1 has attracted lots of attention so far but is still in its early days. I suppose we need to wait and see how the experimental and testing process eventually shapes this new concept. It looks like it could have huge potential and there is a big chance that these improvements will take Google on a new social path.

Let’s just hope that Google +1 will eventually facilitate rather than clutter our search process and that we learn to love our “likes”...

A bit more than a month ago, Google introduced a new feature to its search engine results page called "instant search". Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of search products and user experience at the time (she has now been given a new assignment, managing the company's geo/local products), called it a "fundamental shift in search" and stated that "it's search at the speed of thought". So what does it mean for SEO?

About Google Instant Search

Since the beginning of September, if you are signed in to your Google account and make a search, you will have noticed that you now have this new Google Instant feature "streaming" results to the page and dynamically updating those results as you type. In the same way it appears with the suggested search terms that Google was already displaying in the past, it now pops up the search results in the exact same time.

Google Instant does two things: it returns results more quickly and it predicts search queries as the user types. Marissa Mayer explains that "it's not a search as you type; it's a search before you type". It is also location-based and personalised as the predictions and search results that Google Instant displays will change depending on where Google thinks you’re located and your web history.

When explaining the improvements, Google says that "Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press "search." Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way."

Google has always bet on speed to stay ahead of their competitors and therefore they are constantly looking to bring information to users faster. But what about SEO? Does Google instant Search likely to impact your site’s visibility in Google?

Google Instant Search and SEO

While it is making search faster from the user point of view, the reaction of instant search generated a lot of noise and intrigue in the web marketing world and beyond. Steve Rubel was the first to exclaim "OMG, Google Instant killed SEO" but he was by no means the last.

For the record, SEO is NOT dead. Google explains that "ranking stays the same" and fundamentally, everything remains the same. The basics of Google search are the same, including how results are ranked and how Google determines relevant results. However, although Instant has not killed SEO, it will probably make it evolve (I am using the word probably because it is much too soon to know the real impact) as the users’ search habits and behaviour may be affected by this change and which may in return impact your SEO strategy. The way users are going to find information and interact with the search results is going to change. Indeed, the process of searching on Google with instant search is now a much speedier process for the end user who will probably be less likely than ever to click through to the other pages of results and could instead easily dig deeper into a topic until they see results more to their liking. When users come to Google they often have a very specific objective in mind so it is likely we are going to notice a drop of searches with short queries. In addition, users are going to learn how to use more specific search queries and how to review results before making their decision to click on a link.

Google Instant is a game changer in the way users search for information but it does not change the basic rules of SEO.

SEO has always been about understanding end user behaviour so it is possible that this change of behaviour from the user will require you to adapt your SEO strategy. As Matt Cutts says; "SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognise, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen."

So what you need to do?

Below are the first steps:

1. Read Google's Webmaster Central Blog to understand how impressions will be counted with Google Instant. You may notice some changes in your search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant. Basically impressions are measured in 3 ways with Google Instant:
   1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model. With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases
   2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.
   3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.
2. The goal remains the same: to rank number one for the most searched keywords in your market. So keep working on strong SEO fundamentals and focus on your content, traffic, and conversions. Users are now less likely to scroll below the fold as relevant results get instantly updated as the search query is completed. Before, typical searchers would perform a search, wait for the results, go through the results, then refine the search and repeat the process until they found what they were looking for. Now Google Instant makes that process even easier: people can dig into a topic and find out new areas to explore with very little effort.
3. Pay even more attention to the suggested queries than before, but that is something you should have already been doing since Google introduced Google Suggest in 2008. Find out which long-tail keywords Google Instant suggests and ensure you have a page ranked for most of the variations. Long-tail search is going to be more important, since users can now just keep typing until they see what they want. So make sure you continue to include your long-tail terms into your SEO strategy, and then monitor the performance to see if you need to adjust your tactics.
4. Experiment with different page titles and snippets and track the changes in CTR to see what work best. Indeed, it seems like the CTRs on positions 1 and 2 will rise organically at the expense of other positions. In the past, we have noticed that users spend a reasonable time reading through the meta-description hence we were recommending to place calls to action in there to encourage users to click and therefore to increase the CTR. However today, with Instant Search and results showing faster, users could potentially spend less time reading the meta-description and therefore the calls to action could potentially be moved into the title tag as users might start relying more on these prominent parts of the result they can scan quickly to find the desired result. Something to think about.

What about you? Do you like the new feature? Do you think it is an opportunity for your business? Are you concerned Google Instant will have an impact on your SEO strategy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

There should be no need to introduce you to Google Analytics, the most widely used web analytics application. The tool is powerful and FREE so it isn't hard to see why it is so popular. However, only a small percentage of users fully harness it's potential.

Google is constantly refining and adding new features to it's analytics service. Although you need to be a bit exploratory if you are going to make the most out of the 85 Google Analytics reports available. Lurking beneath the main dashboard Google Analytics gives you the necessary tools to analyse all of your website's data. Here are 5 under-used Google Analytics features you need to know.

1. Exclude internal traffic

Internal traffic to your site can skew your Google Analytics report. If you want to get a better picture of the traffic coming to your site, it is advised to filter out your internal traffic. Google Analytics allows you to set up a filter to easily exclude your own visits from the analytics results.

• On your Google Analytics dashboard, click on the Analytics Settings link.
  
  
• Then click on the Filter Manager link.
  
  
• The Filter Manager page will show you all existing filters for your site. Create a new one by clicking on the Add Filter link.
  
  
• In the new filter window:
  
  Enter the name of your new filter (ie: internal traffic)
  
  "Filter type" - tick the radio button "predefined filter"
  
  We want to exclude traffic from your IP address, so you will need to select "Exclude," "traffic from the IP addresses," and "that are equal to" in the three dropdowns.
  
  Enter your IP address (if you don't know your IP address, simply click on this link)
  
  Select which websites you want to filter by clicking on the appropriate website profile(s) and then clicking "Add"
  
  Finally, click "Save Changes"

Your Google Analytics report should now exclude your own traffic and you can get more accurate tracking data.

2. Set up goals and funnels tracking
(probably the most important tracking feature to set up)

Google describes a goal as a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. Please note that if you have an e-commerce site, there is a more specific tracking feature for measuring your goals.

The "goals" feature is a simple way of tracking your business objectives for your website. A goal must be a measurable action performed by your website's visitors (such as a page view visit to a thank you page). So a business objective + a measurable action = goal

Check out these common examples:

Usually between the initial click and the visitor's action, visitors are required to make multiple steps to complete the desired action. This creates the "goal funnel", with each step being a measurable action. Your visitor can take two routes: 1) follow the intended path, which means the goal is "completed" or 2) decide to leave the process along the way in which case the conversion chain is broken and goal abandoned.

Google Analytics allows you to track visitors as they go through the different steps of the goal funnel and shows you how many potential customers abandon the process, and at which point. The funnels feature is an amazing and very valuable tool that will help you detect issues with your conversion process. With this precious information in hand, you should be able to address the sections of your site preventing you from completing your business objectives, informing future updates.

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is one of the most important actions when it comes to configuring your account. Here is how to do it:

• First you will need to define your goal funnel – When you are on your website, ask yourself what are the steps required to complete the goal? Once you know, write down the URLs that will define your funnel (or ask your developer).
  
  For example:
  1. start_registration.html
  2. enter_shipping_info.html
  3. enter_subscriber_preferences.html
  4. finalise_registration.html
  5. thank_you.html
   
• On your dashboard, click on "Goals" on the left hand side navigation and click on "Set up goals and funnels"
• Enter goal information.
  
  
  
  Note you have the choice between 3 different types of goal: URL destination, time on site and pages/visit.
• Enter goal details
  
  
  
  Set "Match Type" to either "Exact Match," "Head Match," or "Regular Expression Match. This mainly depends on the type of websites you have (ie: static vs. dynamic). You can read more about the difference between Head, Exact, and Regular Expression Match on Google Analytics help page.
  Select if the goal URL is case sensitive and finally you can add a value to a goal.
• Define Your Goal Funnel - Specify the URLs and name each steps of your funnel.
• You are done! You can now analyse your goals performance.

You will only be able to see your goals data in reports after a few days of activity but please note this feature is not backwards compatible. Once the data is collected, go to your dashboard, click on Goals and open the Funnel Visualization Report. Google Analytics will tell you the following:

1. How many people enter at each step of the funnel.
2. How many people abandon at each step.
3. How many people make it to the next stage.
4. How many people make it all the way through.

The funnel will look something similar to this:

On the left you can see how your visitors enter the funnel, on the right where they leave the funnel and where they go. Finally the middle part shows you how visitors progress to the funnel, how many continue on to each step. In the example above, you can see 33,376 started the process and 25,434 go to another section but approximately 10,000 users leave the site at the first step. We can see something must be wrong with the first step. However, the abandonment on the second step is lower, which is good. Finally, you can see the overall conversion rate is 9.98%.

If you need a bit more information about goals in Google analytics, I suggest you check out this very handy tutorial: "Google Analytics IQ Lesson: Goals in Google Analytics"

3. Set up Analytics Intelligence & custom alerts

Google analytics recently launched Intelligence Beta which is an "algorithmic driven intelligence engine". What does that mean? It means Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic, detects any anomaly in your traffic patterns and sends you automatic alerts of significant changes over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Clever eh?

You can also create your own custom alerts, where you set the conditions for the alert depending on what you want to monitor. Go to the left hand side of your dashboard and click on "Intelligence Beta"

You have 2 choices:

1. Set up your own custom reports for specific things that you want to monitor.
   For example, you could have just launched a campaign in a specific location and wanted to be notified how the campaign is impacting traffic from that location. You could also create another alert to see when the traffic from that location is decreasing, so you can find out when the campaign starts to run out.
2. If you are not very familiar with setting up "customised alerts" then you can select one of the templates on the "manage intelligence alerts" page. Just click on "copy" and modify the alerts so it monitors what you need.

Once your intelligence alerts are setup and triggered you will receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily, Weekly or Monthly Alerts on your Google Analytics account or sent by email if you requested that option.
For further information on the Analytics Intelligence feature, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.

4. Tracking traffic from social media

With Google Analytics you can by default analyse traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc. It also automatically tracks referrals from other websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networking sites. However, in your Traffic Source reports, social network visits are grouped together with visits from all the other referral links to your site. If you are only interested in social network referrals there is a trick you can use.

• Select Advanced Segments from the lower left hand side bar in your Google Analytics Dashboard.
  
  
• Once in the Advanced Segment page, select Create a new custom segment.
  
  
• Drag the "source" box which is under "Traffic sources" to "dimension or metric" window.
  
  
• Select "Matches Regular Expression" from the "Condition" drop down. In the Value field, paste the following sources:
  
  digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|
  bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.us|feedburner|twitter|technorati|faves\.com|newsgator|PRweb|
  msplinks|myspace|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl
  
  If you wish to add more domains, simply add a "|"symbol between each name. However this field is limited to 256 characters.
• Name your segment (ie: "social network traffic"), click on "Create segment" and you are done! Then from your dashboard, click on "Advanced segments – All visits" and tick the box for the social networks traffic custom segment you have just created, finally apply the changes.
  
  
• Well done, you can now start comparing your social media traffic sources in relation to your overall site traffic.

5. Create annotations on reports

Google launched this very handy feature at the end of last year allowing comments on graphs regarding events that have happened. Users can either add shared or private notes on the dashboard graph. Every time you make a change to your site, be that technical, design, content or any other updates, make sure you add a note specifying what has been done so if the performance of the site improves/decreases, you can easily explain to your colleagues who see a spike or a dip the reasons why. Watch this video to see it in action.

The "annotations" feature is a great collaborative feature that brings intelligence to data and makes your stats understandable and shareable within your company. As Google explains "A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers."

If you want to go beyond the tips we have discussed here and learn more, here is a list of Google Analytics blogs:

• Google Analytics blog
• Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Analytics Market
• Analytics talk
• LunaMetrics

I hope this post was useful and you will soon become a more knowledgeable Google Analytics user!

After all, no one ever clicks on the sponsored links.

What is twitter?

Twitter is what we call a "microblogging" service, allowing you to post frequent tiny updates on what you're doing. It is a free way for friends, family, co–workers and other to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length, also known as "Tweets".

Users can receive and send updates about what they're doing via the Twitter website but also through several other ways. Check out the official Twitter Downloads page and the list of all third party applications on the Twitter Fan Wiki.

As of October 2008, Twitter claims to have over 3,200,000 accounts registered. Twitter is the most popular microblogging service, but other similar services have emerged: Identi.ca, friendfeed, Plurk, Jaiku (acquired by Google end of 2007), Pownce and also Yammer known as the enterprise version of Twitter.

Why you should get on Twitter?

People on Twitter talk about where they are, what they like, hate, do, plan, read, eat and they also communicate about their good or bad experiences with brands. Indeed, Twitter is a very good place to LISTEN to what people are saying on your products, your services, and to learn about their experiences with the brand. (See my last post: Do marketers and consumers understand each other anymore)

Conversations happening on Twitter are public, searchable and even trackable. To find out when anyone mentions your brand name, your product name, or the name of your employees, you can use the Twitter search tool or Tweetscan. A great feature allows you to subscribe to any keywords and get alerts whenever a new Tweet appears!

By listening, you will be able to spot who is encouraging those conversations and more importantly why. Only then, join in the conversations, follow any person who talks about you and who looks interesting and make sure you reply to anyone talking about your brand, even if you don't have a solution yet. By answering their questions, responding to their opinions, and engaging with them in a real human voice, you'll positively surprise most Twitterers. You can even expect to generate a positive buzz and inspire a blog!

There are some great examples: Michael Arrington complained publicly on Twitter after Comcast support failed to resolve his issue. Comcast was actually listening and settled the matter quite quickly. Michael Arrington posted an article on his blog about it: Comcast, Twitter And The Chicken (trust me, I have a point).

Another similar story started when the famous blogger Louis Gray tweeted about the issue he had to run on his blog with Disqus, a third-party commenting system. One hour later, Daniel Ha, co-founder of Disqus replied to Gray and manage to help him to integrate Disqus comments on his blog. Gray was so pleased that he blogged about it: Disqus' Excellent Customer Service Enables Comments Integration.

Companies already using Twitter

• Comcast is reaching out to customers online and tries to improve its customer service.
• Southwest Airlines answers customer questions about ticket prices, flight delays, news...
• Whole Foods Market posts details about discounts, recipes... and are quite interactive with twitterers.
• The CEO of Zappos shares details of his life with more than 15,000 "followers" and he also encourages his employees to join, currently 460 employees are on Twitter.
• Dell has several Twitter accounts for offers, news, promotions, communities, blogs...
• Ultimate Rugby Sevens (UR7s) uses Twitter to publish insider Rugby Sevens news.

If you want to get a complete directory of brands using Twitter, the Social Brand Index offers a very good listing of companies on Twitter.

Some tips when using Twitter as a part of your Social Media Strategy

1. Remember it's all about honesty. Be transparent and authentic with people.
2. Include a real name on your Twitter profile and not just the brand name. Yes, you are running this Twitter account for your company but there must be somebody writing all these Tweets! People want to know who they are talking to. JetBlue is doing well by providing the customer support employee's name currently on duty:
   
   
3. Make the most of the "Bio": use this section to explain why you are on Twitter and to give important information like an email address. Comcast for instance gives the customer support contact:
   
   
4. Listen to people talking about you both negatively and positively. But also try to find people with similar interests, who are passionate about your industry. For example, if you are a food company, look who's talking about recipes, diet, healthy eating... Then follow those people. The screenshot below is a good example of what you shouldn't do! How do you want to build a two-way communication if you are only talking to and about yourself? By following people you show you care for them and you are willing to listen to them.
   
   
5. Interact and communicate using the "@replies": Twitter is not a broadcast medium where you can only talk about yourself and your products. It's all about engaging and creating a real dialogue with people! Help them to solve problems they encounter with your products/services and offer them value.

These are just some tips I learnt and which I thought it is worth sharing with you. Please feel free to make any comments or to share your experience using Twitter. I'm also using Twitter so, if you wish, you can follow me here.

It is with interest which we have been watching Google’s Android Application competition. This is the $10m competition to develop applications for Google’s Android mobile platform. The 50 semi-finalists were announced today, and although a lot of the applications are shrouded in secrecy, a strong theme seems to be developing. The majority of applications seem to be based around Social Location tools, or Security applications.

For more about the semi finalists information have a look at this site.

We recently re-launched Meet the Author's interview site as Authors' Lounge TV.

The site had been around for about 5 months and had built up a decent following from the blogosphere. It made sense as fans are quite likely to write about exclusive video interviews of their favourite authors.

With bloggers in mind we introduced a few cool social bookmarking and embedding tools to help syndicate the content around the web, as well as overhauling the look and feel so it felt more like an Internet Television Channel.

In the two months since re-launch the traffic has tripled on average and the number one source of referrals are indeed blogs, with natural listings on Google a close second. Well you have to chuck in a bit of SEO haven't you?