Analytics

In a recent declaration on the Google Analytics Blog, it was announced that they had decided to open a new forum in the framework of Google Help to assist users in finding solutions to the Google Analytics problems they faced.

With the launch of the forum, Google users will be able to seek advice from Google Analytics employees directly as well as other Google Analytics users. The GA is expecting that with the launch of this forum the problems and questions of users can be dealt effectively and speedily.

Users on the forum will have an option of voting for what they think is the best answer. This in turn will help users to locate valuable information faster. The forum is designed in such a way that when users create a new thread, a list of related questions will also make an appearance simultaneously. John Henson of LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorised Consultant, spoke about the new forums being opened by Google. He said that when users are able to recognise quickly when a question is answered will contribute to the saving of time.

He also said that the experts will be in a position to identify the questions which need to be addressed rather than wasting time on the ones which already have been. The old Google Analytics help group has been closed down in terms of adding new posts. But they form useful archives and can be used for searching information.

If you thought Yahoo, with their recent acquisition of IndexTools and subsequent relaunch as Yahoo Analytics, were going to dominate the web analytics market, well, you are wrong as it turns out they have been beaten in the web analytics race by Google.

A couple of years ago, the launch of Google Analytics had been seen as a significant development. While it had started out as a tool suitable for small and medium-sized websites, it didn’t have enough about it to be used with larger websites that required more complex data.

While Yahoo has been releasing Yahoo Analytics gradually, Google has outpaced them and released a full improved version of Google Analytics with a bunch of new features, including better segmentation capabilities, just last week. What this means to Yahoo is that their bitter competitors have not only released a tool with features comparable to Yahoo Analytics, but also added in some interesting new features.

The new Google Analytics tool is user-friendly and more complete than most of the available offerings, both free and paid, in the web analytics market. It makes creating custom reports and looking at data in a variety of ways simple even for the most technologically challenged folks.

While it is believed that some of the more expensive analytics tools that are more comprehensive will survive due to their strong client base, the other lesser equipped tools will inevitably bite the dust. What makes Google Analytics a compelling choice is that it is all available for free.

AdaptiveBlue, a Semantic Web startup has announced the launch of a new service known as Glue. The concept is more or less similar with MyBlogLog which shows the people who have visited a web page recently. However, Glue shows people who have recently visited a certain concept.

For Example, the users are on a web page checking out entries related to the movie Spider-man, Glue bar displays information about the people who have visited the pages about Spider-man all over the Internet, such as IMDB and Netflix.

Glue works with the help of contextual technology of AdaptiveBlue, analysis of user’s existing social networking profiles on websites like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook and also a mixture of an add-on from Firefox, (Get Glue). Also it shows the reviews and comments put up by your friends who also have Glue and it also enables people to learn about other people who have similar taste in the contents which are being viewed.

So, instead of getting confused between somebody’s opinion and a review from a Webpage about the same content, Glue can be used to make calculated decisions as it combines both the opinions in a justified manner enabling things to get more clear. But to give the detailed and clear picture, Glue will have to have a very big data base in terms of users.

Google’s two offerings, Google Website Optimiser and Google Analytics, have both dropped their Beta label, and have both moved up from their ‘testing’ phases. There are 27 languages in which Google Website Optimiser is available.

The language options include English (Australia, UK & U.S.), French, German, Finnish, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil & Portugal), Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Formerly a feature within the Google AdWords advertising service, this free site-testing tool is now accessible through its own web site (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) as well.

Google Website Optimiser helps improve user experience on the Web by showing its users what their visitors want to see. Rather than debating or guessing how a webpage might look best, users can continually test different combinations of web site ingredients, such as images and text, to see which one yields the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
An official note to Google Website Optimiser mentioned:

One can then Learn what changes will drive the most conversions. Its intuitive reports will enable even the mathematically-challenged to easily and quickly identify as well as implement the best combination.

According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited as being the inventor of the phenomenon of world wide web, the semantic web is not a separate web. “It’s just an extension of the current one,” stated Berners-Lee. “Information is provided well-defined meaning - better enabling computers & people to work in cooperation,” he stated, and added it could well be taken one step further by pulling digital photo-image albums into the mix, tallying pictures of outings with spending peaks on the bank statement. This would be akin to a behind-the-scenes, seamless process. Web users would only get to see the end result, rather than how it was arrived at.

He also explained how the semantic web could help people to track their finances. Explaining the mechanism, he alluded to an online bank statement & a personal calendar, in which simply by dragging & dropping the information - from the calendar on to the statement – one could identify the periods of high expenditure.

There’s another benefit of ‘semantic’ web. Most existing search engines are largely not able to ‘read’ some of the information that’s found on the Internet, which might be very relevant to a particular search query like photos or videos, since they haven’t been well tagged with consistent ‘metadata’ (the labels, which inform computers what a particular piece of data means).

To overcome this problem, the idea of the intelligent and sensible ‘semantic’ web is gaining a lot of pushing and backing from forward-looking technology start-ups apart from established companies.