SEO Blog

Here are links from a number of Web analytics experts and other bloggers that I added to my Google Analytics Upgrade post from last week.

What Web Analytics Experts Are Saying:

New Google Analytics Visualizations — Clinton Ivy is a WAA board member and a consultant at WebSideStory just unifed with Visual Sciences. His post offers comments and recommendations on the new visualizations in V2.

Google Analytics V2 - Jeffrey Veen Podcast — Craig Danuloff founder of Commerce360 has podcasted (12:18) his post-V2 intervew with Jeffrey Veen. The interview covers design and usability goals, presentation of related data in report screens, new segmentation abilities, report distribution features and new date selection and data-range features.

E-metrics San Francisco 2007: Busy, busy, busy — Ian Thomas marketing director at Web Abacus makes a short comment what most impressed him was “that Google had the discipline to fix what was broken about GA - its interface…”

What Others Experts Are Saying:
27 Features That Make Google Analytics Best of Breed — Adam Ostrow from Mashable has a post for Web analytics newbies on 27 different features that V2 GA offers.

First Look - Google Analytics Launches New Interface and Reporting — Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim discusses the new interface and the new features.

Tuesday at EMetrics Brett Crosby and Jeff Veen announced Version 2 of Google Analytics (GA). There is a post both on the Official Google Blog and on the Google Analytics Blog.

The list below has some of the main improvements in Version 2 of Google analytics as reported by Google and the Web analytics experts.

Main Improvements of Version 2 GA:

1. Scheduled email of reports or dashboards
2. Customizable dashboard
3. Site overlay enhancements
4. Improved visitor segmentation
5. Geo-targeting enhancements
6. PDF extracts
7. Trend and over-time graphics
8. Contextual help tips

What Web Analytics Experts Are Saying:

New Training Material for New Version of GA — Andrew Miles from GA Experts feels like users of the new V2 product will “soon realise how effective the enhancements will be to both users and businesses.” He posts on some of the features they found useful during their two months of beta testing the product on their Websites.

Google Analytics Is Re-Launched: Do These Five Things First In V2 — Avinash Kaushik an analytics evangelist for Google says V2 is “radically different and provides such a compelling value proposition to users of web analytics”. His blog post discusses new data interaction model, the enhanced data discoverability, features that help you get relevant context, improved segmentation, and number of other “upgraded goodies”.

New: New Google Analytics Visualizations — Clinton Ivy is a WAA board member and a consultant at WebSideStory just unifed with Visual Sciences. His post offers comments and recommendations on the new visualizations in V2.

New: Google Analytics V2 - Jeffrey Veen Podcast — Craig Danuloff founder of Commerce360 has podcasted (12:18) his post-V2 intervew with Jeffrey Veen. The interview covers design and usability goals, presentation of related data in report screens, new segmentation abilities, report distribution features and new date selection and data-range features.

All the news that is fit to Blog — Gary Angel the President of Semphonic take a poke at GA in his post on what is big news out of eMetrics. His low opinion of GA before the update is “I really wouldn’t have recommended GA to any company that actually wanted web analytics.” Perhaps after he gets “a chance to work with it a bit I’ll have a better opinion,” and hopefully he will blog that.

New: E-metrics San Francisco 2007: Busy, busy, busy — Ian Thomas marketing director at Web Abacus makes a short comment what most impressed him was “that Google had the discipline to fix what was broken about GA - its interface…”

New Version of Google Analytics! — Jeff Gills from the Google Analytics Team comments on V2 that “the new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you can look at a single report to gain insights rather than having to pull up several reports to understand what action to take.” In his post at the Official Google Analytics blog there are links to the product tour, report finder tool, a FAQ and the new version of the features tour page.

Who’s laughing at Google Analytics now? — Julien Coquet from OX2 claims that with the new V2 of Google analytics “the bar been kicked several steps higher…” He has put up two posts on V2 and has promising to post more details soon.

Welcome to the New Google Analytics — Justin Cutroni a GA authorized consultant at EpikOne notes that V2 is so “radically different than the old reporting interface” that “You may even be lost the first time you log in”. Justin has put up six shorter posts that deal with the new reporting interface, the new data range selector, custom dashboards, email reports, sticky URLs and PDF report export.

New Google Analytics Plus Insight from Brett Crosby — Manoj Jasra director of technology at Enquiro Search Solutions has posted his post-V2 interview with Brett Crosby the senior manger of Google analytics (audio 7:44).

Google Analytics: Extreme Makeover Edition — Michael Harrison a GA support tech over at ROI Revolution assures us that “this redesign is a very good thing. We’ve been using the new interface for over two months now, and it’s made day-to-day analysis a breeze.” Michael also also posted View Entire Referring URL in Google Analytics on V2.

Update to Google Analytics — Pat McCarthy director of business development at Right Media notes in his blog post that he had been “wondering for a while what the status of MeasureMap was with Google, and if Veen and team were working on it or Google Analytics.” He feels that the MeasureMap team had a hand in the redesign.

New Google Analytics Interface and New t-shirts — Robbin Steif from LunaMetrics feels that the ability to “now segment by landing page” is “much more important to me than any other enhancement.” Her comment “GA is still free, with the new interface” got me wondering if Google would ever start charging for this product.

What Others Experts Are Saying:

New: 27 Features That Make Google Analytics Best of Breed — Adam Ostrow from Mashable has a post for Web analytics newbies on 27 different features that V2 GA offers.

New: First Look - Google Analytics Launches New Interface and Reporting — Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim discusses the new interface and the new features.

Google announced on the 14th of April that it has acquired ad software giant DoubleClick for $3.1 billion cash. Google claims that this merger will benefit both advertisers and users. The search community, however, isn’t so sure.

One interesting development is that DoubleClick owns a subsidiary SEO/SEM firm, Performics. Performics does affilliate, SEO, and natural search engine marketing. Now that Google owns it, it’ll be one of the most “natural” SEO’s out there.

It’s not clear what it will do with Performics at this point, but Google says it’s keeping it. Andy Beal suggests it’s a bid to take over the SEO industry. Danny Sullivan says in his comments to this Search Engine Journal article that he thinks Google will have to sell. Google’s ownership of Performics raises too many unfair competition issues.

It’s true the interests of the user, as defined by Google, can sometimes conflict with the interests of the client. The merger raises lots of questions: how would Google balance these two competing interests? Will Performics become the only Google-affiliated SEO firm? And how will that affect the industry?

But Performics isn’t the only issue here. There are also some antitrust and privacy concerns.

Among the first to object to the deal were Microsoft and AT&T, both of which have been anti-trust targets in the past. Both companies are concerned that Google already controls the paid search and contextual ad market, and that the DoubleClick merger will put the competition at a serious disadvantage in the display advertising arena as well.

Time Warner, which owns AOL and Yahoo, are joining Microsoft in calling for closer scrutiny of this deal by antitrust regulators.

Privacy advocates are also raising concerns about the deal. DoubleClick sells DART, software that tracks users’ Internet surfing behavior. Companies use that information to target their ad campaigns. It also offers an ad exchange that connects advertisers with publishers.

Google claims that DoubleClick’s powerful tracking software will help it make its own advertising more relevant and less obtrusive to users, and says it will protect consumer privacy. But the scary thing isn’t what Google says it will do, but what it’s capable of doing.

DoubleClick’s software patents give it the ability to closely track data about where individual users go online, and use that data to target the online ads the users see. Google already collects information every time someone uses the search engine, including the search query and the user’s IP address. DoubleClick’s software will make it extremely easy for Google to keep profiles on individual users’ interests and search habits without their knowledge.

So far, the deal between Google and DoubleClick isn’t 100% solid. Competitors may still file formal objections on antitrust grounds, and it’s likely that regulators will need to take a closer look. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out in the next few weeks.

Matt Cutts created a firestorm recently by announcing in his blog that there’s now a way people can report websites that seem to be using paid links.

You can do this using either an authenticated or an unauthenticated form through Google’s webmaster console. You need to log in to access the authenticated form, but Matt says they are given more weight.

Link buying is pretty common. The list of places to buy links is endless: from text link ads and brokers like TextLinkBrokers or Text Link Ads to link auctions on Ebay and LinkAdage, to sites like ReviewMe, PayPerPost and Blogsvertise, where you can buy links on blog posts. Link buying is easy and widespread — and it looks like Google is planning on building the devaluing of bought links into the ranking algorithm.

This particular blog entry of Matt’s attracted almost five hundred responses. Chief among webmasters’ concerns was how to define a “paid” link. If you do a friend a favor by linking to their site, is that the same as a link to a client or an all-out link sell? How can third-party observers who might be considering reporting you to the link police tell the difference?

Another big concern is dishonest link reporting. People are worried that their competitors might follow their links back to a site with a higher PR ranking than theirs, assume they paid for the link, and make a report to hurt their business.
Shady competitors might also try to buy Text Link Ads for their competition and then denounce them to Google.

The bottom line? The most direct benefit to anyone pointing out a paid link to Google is to hurt a competitor’s business. Chances are, many people who take the time to do this won’t have pure motives.

Andy Beal raises a good point: What business does Google have in forcing webmasters to disclose their business relationships in a certain way?

And does “full disclosure” really benefit the user that much? Eric Ward brought up a good point in the comments on Matt’s blog “I can envision scenarios where the searcher’s experience was in fact better because of some type of ‘compensated’ link strategy performed by the sites appearing in the results.” As long as a link is useful, do users care whether they’re paid?

There’s really nothing wrong with paid links from a ethical standpoint . Buying a link is no different than buying another type of advertising, like a banner ad or a television commercial. A lot of people feel that Google has no right to tell them where they can and can’t spend their advertising dollars.

While Google insists it’s all about keeping SEO’s from manipulating organic results to suit their own ends, the SEO’s are nervous that this is a sign of Google’s plan to dominate all advertising online.

A lot of people are accusing Google of being hypocritical because the more Google makes it difficult for webmasters to benefit from buying and selling other links, the more money they’ll spend on AdWords, right?

Most link buying is not for the click though traffic. By and large, they’re buying links for ranking juice or Pagerank — a system Google set up itself. And if Google’s really planning on cracking down on paid links, what about web directories. Just about all directories have degenerated into link sells, even if people tend not to admit it: you submit your site to a directory for the same reasons you’d buy a link, only they say you are paying for the review. What’s the difference?

The big question, of course, is what Google is planning on doing with the reported sites. Matt stated in his blog that the information people send will only be used to tweak the algorithms to better tell paid from nonpaid links. Google wants to build into the algorithm the ability to distinguish paid from nonpaid links so they can turn off the link juice from the paid link. They claim they don’t want the people with the money ranking better than people with good content.

There’s a chance that people are making a mountain out of a molehill. That may turn out to be true, but as I’ve said before: what’s making people nervous isn’t what Google says it will do; it’s what it’s capable of doing.