It’s Google Q1 earnings day, and because we all know that you have better things to do than listen to executives dryly read prepared statements, we’re taking one for the team and keeping you in the know about the important stuff. Google beat Q1 expectations, reporting revenues of $10.65B and a net income of $2.9B. During the company’s earnings call, Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora touched on the progress of the company’s top products, in particular sharing one interesting stat about Google Analytics — that more than 10 million websites are now using Google’s cross-platform website stats service. → Read More
We’re five hours away from what might be the first government shutdown since 1995. Therefore it comes as no surprise that people are checking Isthegovernmentshutdown.com and that the site, created by WSJ editor Zach Seward to keep us posted on the furlough’s status, would experience a spike in traffic.
What does come as a surprise is that a good number of the visits came in through the House of Representatives ISP, pushing the congressional body, which also happens to be the battleground that might instigate the shutdown, into the top ten service providers on Google Analytics. Other government agencies like the Senate, the Navy, Homeland Security, the Justice Department and Health and Human Services were also in the top 50 in terms of referral traffic. → Read More
Blogger, Google’s blog publishing platform, has just been given a useful new feature many a Blogger user will appreciate: near real-time statistics (via Louis Gray).
Dubbed Blogger Stats, the feature is available for all non-private Blogger blogs. The only catch is you’ll only see the new ‘Stats’ tab when you go to draft.blogger.com.
On the new Stats page, you’ll see a tab that says ‘Now’, which gives Blogger users an almost real-time overview of which articles are most popular right now, and where those visitors are coming from (both in terms of source and geographical location). → Read More
Some people don’t like the idea of Google having any data about them. Unfortunately, if you visit a site tracked by Google Analytics (and chances are you hit several each day), you have no choice. But soon, you might.
Google is testing a browser-based opt-out solution for Google Analytics, they briefly note today on the Google Analytics blog. Specifically, this would be a “global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.” They note that engineers are finalizing and testing the funtionality. → Read More
A month ago, Jason Calacanis went on a rant about why everyone should boycott comScore. He felt they were using sketchy tactics to bully people into their pay-to-play model for measuring web analytics. He also noted that their free competitors like Quantcast, Google, and Compete would soon eat their lunch. Both Quantcast and Google (Analytics) offer direct counting of pageviews (but even these methods can be abused). But you may wonder how exactly Compete gets its numbers? It appears, that some sketchy tactics are (or at least were) employed, as well.
We were recently pointed to this post from last month by Ben Edelman, a Harvard privacy advocate. In it, he details the data the Upromise toolbar collects and sends out. This toolbar is used by college students looking for savings on various items across the web, and can be quite useful. But until a few weeks ago, it appears they were also sending web browsing (and more personal) data to Compete without anyone’s knowledge. Writes Edelman: → Read More
[Germany] Several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics, the search giant’s free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts and search behavior of their visitors (and much more).
According to an article in today’s Zeit Online (poor Google translation here), multiple federal and state government officials charged with guarding over national data protection are convinced that Google Analytics is against the law in Germany and are mulling imposing fines on companies who use the service to gather detailed stats based on their website visitors’ usage patterns without the explicit consent of those visitors. → Read More
[Germany] Several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics, the search giant’s free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts and search behavior of their visitors (and much more).
According to an article in today’s Zeit Online (poor Google translation here), multiple federal and state government officials charged with guarding over national data protection are convinced that Google Analytics is against the law in Germany and are mulling imposing fines on companies who use the service to gather detailed stats based on their website visitors’ usage patterns without the explicit consent of those visitors. → Read More
The ability to keep tabs on mobile visitors is becoming increasingly important as more and more users surf the web via mobile browsers. With that said, there are a variety of website tracking / analytic reporting tools available across the Net that include mobile reporting. However, one of the more popular (and free) apps, Google Analytics, has essentially been asleep at the mobile analytics wheel…until now. Google has announced the addition of new mobile tracking and reporting features (among other new features) to its analytics suite. → Read More
Moments ago, Google released the public beta version of the Google Analytics API after running a private beta program with hundreds of developers for about a year.
When Google announced a great deal of updates to Google Analytics last October, the company already said the API was ‘coming soon’, but obviously it took them another 6 months to effectively start rolling out.
With the Google Analytics data API, developers can develop client applications that access Google Analytics data and subsequently present it in new, innovative ways. By combining a wide variety of metrics and dimensions, an API-based client application can deliver custom reports, more refined data or new visualizations that in turn provide new ways to analyze the performance of websites and web applications.
One of the applications that was built using the API and which is being featured on the launch website is Polaris, one of the products built by Desktop Reporting, which aims to bring Google Analytics to the desktop. The full suite, a full-featured Adobe AIR-powered GA reporting tool called Dopac, is still a couple of weeks away from launching, but Polaris already brings some of the data to the desktop in the form of widgets and is definitely worth checking out. → Read More
Google Analytics just got better. Google will begin rolling out a set of major upgrades today to the free Website measuring tool. The new features include the ability to create custom reports, better ways to look at audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, an API (on it’s way), the introduction of cool bubble “motion charts,” and some user interface improvements. Let’s take these new features one at a time. → Read More
Kampyle has integrated its user feedback management platform into Google Analytics and Nuconomy to provide side-by-side analysis of user feedback and website analytics. Since the launch of its platform last March, Kampyle has been implemented by over 1,500 websites whose users have generated over 100,000 feedback messages collectively. The company claims that small sites average one to five feedback messages per day, medium sites average 20-30, and large sites average 50-1,000. Kampyle presents the most value to these large sites, which must manage their feedback effectively or drown in a sea of suggestions. Kampyle naturally got the idea to integrate into website analytics from user feedback. The startup found that users would often keep two browser tabs open at once: one for Google Analytics and one for its own dashboard. Tracking analytics and feedback side-by-side allows website owners to keep a closer eye on usage patterns and quickly identify technical and usability issues. The integration is also meant to help with A/B testing and the measurement of other changes to a site, such as the addition of new pages or sections and how they affect user behavior. Kampyle has been integrated into Google Analytics by way of a greasemonkey script. Publishers must install a Firefox Add-on to enable the functionality (no other browser is supported at this time). The integration with Nuconomy, a next generation web analytics platform, is far “cleaner” since both companies are in Yossi Vardi’s portfolio. The two companies worked out a private API that enables users to view feedback messages related to particular pages and then hop over to analyze engagement and interaction analytics for the same pages in Nuconomy. Beyond these integrations, Kampyle has also added 60 language translations to its feedback form. Forms created in English can now be instantly deployed in French, German, or any of the other available languages. A greater degree of customization is also now available with categories, sub-categories, colors, icons and feedback button styles. CrunchBase Information Kampyle Nuconomy Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
This morning it appears that a number of Google services are having problems. We first noticed last night when our Google Analytics account wasn’t reporting any new data since 9am yesterday, but Analytics is often notoriously slow in receiving updates. This morning there were no further updates with our Analytics data, and in addition to that we have heard reports that both Google Finance and Gmail were and still are also having problems. Below is a screenshot of the Techcrunch stats from Google Analytics from yesterday, showing the sudden drop in hits being recorded. It appears that the outages have affected a subset of Google’s servers and only those servers that are responsible for collecting analytics data and serving both Finance and Gmail for some users. Despite the huge capacity that Google has, and with plans for multiple new large datacenters across the country – they still at times experience outages on some of their services. Google is so big and so popular that even the slightest outage or problem is felt across the web. Since becoming open to all for registration for free, Google Analytics has become a very popular service, especially amongst bloggers. A quick scan of Technorati or Google Blogsearch results shows a large number of bloggers who have been reporting the outage in the past few hours. Search Engine Roundtable was amongst the first to report the issue with Google finance (see the screenshot below, courtesy of their post) GigaOm is also reporting the outages, and as yet there has been no official word from Google nor from any of the Google blogs or bloggers. Analytics has been affected for more than 24 hours now, the other problems seem random. If you have any news on any other outages to other Google services, or if you know what went wrong, leave a comment here. We will continue to try to find out what has happen and to get an official word from Google. Update: It seems that other Google services are also down, namely Google News (story and screenshot at Google Blogoscoped) and users having problems with Blogger (from our comments below, see the error page here). The Google Analytics blog has a post that says the system is down for maintenance, and that users should be able to see a full update of all their date ‘by the end of the day’ (assuming they mean → Read More
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