In our third video, we turn to Ruth Doane, another Tech Lead, to take a step back and look under the hood of Google Analytics itself. Did you ever wonder how data is collected and organized in Google Analytics? See what happens to traffic data after it is sent to Google Analytics and learn how it gets processed and stored, and then ends up in the Web Interface and Custom Reporting.
And best of all, learn how the API works with your data, and how it puts you are in the driver seat. Enjoy!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team
Today, we introduced a new search feature that makes it easier for you to find forum posts or discussions related to what you’re searching for. This new addition to Google search results applies to sites that tend to have a large number of posts on a specific topic. When several different discussions on a site are relevant to your query, we indent them under the primary result and include the date of each post.
So for instance, if you search for [getting from rome to florence] you will see, below the third result, a list of relevant discussions on various ways to get between these cities.
It’s always nice to know what others are saying about the best ways to get around (by boat or train) and how recent those comments are — especially if it’s your first time traveling to Italy.
We hope this feature gives you a deeper view into the relevant content available on sites throughout the web — even when that content spans multiple pages or discussions. At the same time, the main search results are diverse as always — so if you can’t pinpoint a useful comment there’s a list of relevant sites there to help.
Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management and Devin Mullins, Software Engineer
Sometimes I do a search on my desktop computer, only to find that I need to repeat the same search again later on my mobile phone. Today in the US we’re launching Personalized Suggest for Android, iPhone and Palm WebOS, which makes it really easy to repeat your past searches on the go. For example, suppose that before I depart for the airport, I quickly check my flight status by searching for “american airlines 19″ using google.com on my computer. Later, as I am hailing a taxi in rush hour traffic, I can open google.com on my phone, click in the search box, and choose “american airlines 19″ from the list of search suggestions!
To try this yourself, make sure that you are signed-in to the same Google Account on your computer and on your phone when searching. In addition, Web History needs to be enabled for your Google Account. Mobile users can turn on/off history by selecting “Save searches” or “Do not save searches” under Settings on google.com.
Posted by Toshi Tajima, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team
How long would it take to translate all the world’s web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.
Today, we’re happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.
After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on your page.
It’s easy to install — all you have to do is cut and paste a short snippet into your webpage to increase the global reach of your blog or website.
Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it’s not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation Day, and we’d like to take the opportunity to celebrate the contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world’s content more accessible to everyone.
How long would it take to translate all the world’s web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.
Today, we’re happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.
After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on your page.
It’s easy to install — all you have to do is cut and paste a short snippet into your webpage to increase the global reach of your blog or website.
Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it’s not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation Day, and we’d like to take the opportunity to celebrate the contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world’s content more accessible to everyone.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate
The mobile search team is always looking for new ways to make searching the world around you as easy and useful as searching the web. Today we’re introducing a redesigned local search experience on your phone that integrates with Google Maps on your computer and includes browseable categories that let you search without typing. Let me tell you how I used these features on my recent vacation to Hawaii.
Before I left, I researched places to visit on Google Maps. I signed in to my Google account and starred the places I wanted to go. Once I got to Hawaii, by signing in on my phone, I was able to see the places I starred on desktop Maps under “Starred Places”. I could then click through on place names to visit mobile-optimized versions of Place Pages for Google Maps that include opening hours, reviews, photos, and more.
The new category browse feature made it easy to find a place to rent bicycles for a quick tour of the coastline. I just tapped on “Entertainment & Recreation” and then “Bicycles” to execute a search — no typing necessary. When it was time for scuba diving, I didn’t see an appropriate category, so I started typing “SCUBA” in the search box and clicked on a suggestion for “Scuba Tour Agency”. A few hours later, I was petting a white-tipped reef shark!
Of course, local search isn’t only useful when you’re traveling — here’s an example of planning a birthday party in my hometown, San Francisco:
To access these features on your mobile device, go to www.google.com/m/local, or just click on the Local tab on www.google.com. The product is available in the US and China, with more regions coming soon.
Posted by Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, Mobile Local Search Team
A couple of weeks ago we quietly launched a new and easier way to share private videos: now you can generate a special URL for your private video and send it to up to 25 people, who, assuming they’re logged in to YouTube, just have to click to view. This should make it a lot easier for your technology-challenged relatives to watch that video of baby’s first steps without having to share it with the whole world.
A neat thing about this feature was that it was an outcome of a recent “hackday” here at YouTube. Hackdays are similar in spirit to “20% time” — the amount of time in a week engineers at Google/YouTube are encouraged free think and innovate on projects they’re passionate about. These efforts allow us to focus on launching smaller features that aren’t on our official roadmaps but that we hope are still worthwhile for our users. Anyway, this hackday came with donuts, which were delicious and way too tempting for me to resist. I also had a strong personal motivation for figuring this out: I’m in a hip-hop dance group, and the troupe wanted to share practice videos without going through the process of becoming Friends on YouTube.
Even without any official announcement (until this post, that is!), uptake and usage of this feature has been strong. Here you can see the growth of private-videos-per-day using friend-to-friend sharing versus the new URL-sharing:
So test it out: go here and click on Edit on any one of your videos. Scroll down to “Broadcasting and Sharing Options,” and you should see the privacy settings there. Click on Private to unlock the different ways of sharing the video, including the option to generate a limited-access URL. You can find out more about private videos in this Help Center article.
Mike Lambert, Software Engineer, recently watched a friend’s private video.
Hasbro, the makers of the Monopoly game, have officially announced a competition that gives Monopoly-lovers the chance to design a building that will be included in the new interactive game Monopoly City Streets.
To enter this competition, you need to design a 3D building using Google SketchUp and upload it to the Google 3D Warehouse. The deadline to submit entries is Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 11:59pm, EST. Visit the Monopoly City Streets blog for the Official Rules, prizes, and more information.
From SketchUp, choose “Share Model” and upload your 3D building to the Google 3D Warehouse (you must have a Google account to sign in).
In the upload window, add the tag “monopolycompetition09” and make sure that you’ve checked “Allow 3D Warehouse users to contact me about this model” so we can contact you if you win!
Within 48 hours, your model/entry will appear in the Competition Collection in the Google 3D Warehouse.
Technical Guidelines:
Buildings can be any size and any shape
Buildings must not have photo-textures; they must be painted with solid colors
The file size limit is 2 MB
The file format should be .SKP
A few quick tips:
Keep it simple. Or not. The judges will be looking at all designs – simple and complex.
Go crazy. Remember, the MONOPOLY world is a fun place. Make your building the same! Go wild and have oodles of fun doing it.
Upload as many designs as you want. The more you submit, the greater the chance of your design winning!
For the analytics ninjas out there, you know that data accuracy is probably one of the most challenging aspects of analytics across all solutions and platforms, and you learn to apply best practices and establish processes to improve data collection and reporting.
But for the rest of us, how do we help marketers, business owners, and webmasters have confidence in their data? Analytics is all about clarity. It should help you see actionable statistics clearly and quickly. However, when you have a website structure with multiple domains and subdomains – which is often the case – sometimes things can get jumbled.
For instance, you are a CMO or a Director of Marketing at the enterprise and you are responsible for the performance and ROI of a large number of web proprieties. You look at your analytics reports and you can’t find your ecommerce data from site A, site B is referring traffic to itself (definitely not a good thing!), and conversion data from your marketing campaign microsite is no where to be found.
This image sums up the feeling.
No need to panic. This post aims to offer an approach to help you plan your Google Analytics accounts setup in a structured fashion to help with clarity. I hope that by following the approach and the technical steps, you will be able to collect and manage all your data, make more sense of it, and most importantly, ensure what you are reporting on, trending, dashboarding and analyzing is based on accurate data.
There are two distinct sections of this post:
The Strategy (non-technical)
The How (technical)
The Strategy
There are many ways to structure your Google Analytics profiles when you have multiple domains and subdomains. But in this post I will limit myself to the one that I like the most and I believe is the least confusing.
Before I go into details of the solution, and for simplification, let us assume we are dealing with a project that has the following requirements:
A business with 3 domains (www.a.com, www.b.com, and www.c.com)
1 domain (a.com) links to a 3rd party shopping cart (www.mystore.com)
2 domains (a.com and b.com) have multiple sub-domains
Here is a graphical representation of the structure:
Measurement Requirements
Track each domain and sub-domain separately (e.g. www.a.com, news.a.com, and blog.b.com)
Track the rollup/overall traffic for all domains and sub-domains
Track full e-commerce transactions
Solution
Create a Google Analytics account for each domain (www.a.com, www.b.com, and www.c.com)
Customize the tracking code to link the multiple sub-domains with their main domains
Link the third party shopping cart with the main domain and install Google Analytics tracking code in all shopping pages
Create a rollup Google Analytics account and add its code to all domains and sub-domains
Graphical example of a well-planned Analytics Account Structure:
Now on to the technical stuff. If you don’t enjoy javascript and regular expressions, you may stop here and ask your webmaster or technical analyst to read further
The How:
I will try to illustrate the technical implementation in 10 simple steps:
1- Create a unique Google Analytics account for each domain www.a.com, www.b.com, and www.c.com and then use the account number UA-AAAAAAAA-1 in the code in step 3 and use the accounts UA-BBBBBBBB-1 for www.b.com and UA-CCCCCCCC-1 for www.c.com in the code in step 8.
2- Create a Google Analytics account for the a rollup account that will oversee all domains and sub-domains (use the GA account number UA-XXXXXXXX-1 in the code used in step 3 and
3- Add the following Google Analytics tracking code to the main site (www.a.com) and its sub-domains (blog.a.com, news.a.com, images.a.com, and media.a.com)
About the following code: We have a regular pageTracker object to track activity on each particular subdomain and a rollupTracker to track activity across all subdomains and the third party checkout site. (Click here to learn more about the customizations we made to the standard Google Analytics tracking code)
8- Repeat step number 3 for domains www.b.com and www.c.com after updating the Google Analytics account number UA-AAAAAAAA-1 and the setDomainName value.
To view the entire code for www.b.com and its sub-domains (click here)
To view the entire code for www.c.com (click here)
9- Create a profile for each sub-domain (only if needed)
In order to track a sub-domain (ex. blog.b.com) in its own profile, follow the following three steps:
a- Create a filter that include only traffic from Hostname=blog.b.com
b- Create a profile and name it “Blog”
c- Apply the sub-domain filter to the new profile 10- As you might have noticed from the codes that we added so far to all pages, we added an extra Google Analytics account to track all pageviews across domains and sub-domains to one Google Analytics account. We call this account “rollup account”.
var rollupTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXXX-1″); rollupTracker._trackPageview();
Since in the rollup account, we will track pages from different sites and many of these pages might share the same naming convention, I suggest that you create an advanced filter that adds the hostname to the page name to differentiate between pages with same URI.
Once you apply the filter, the upcoming data will appear as following:
Note, in the example above if we didn’t apply the “Add Hostnames” filter, all home.aspx pages will appear as one page with 2685 pageviews.
If you have been with us so far, you are now ready to conduct your analysis based on clean and much more accurate data
To review each domain by itself and for deep-dive analysis, use the domain profiles
To get an overview and to see how the business is doing across all sites, use the “Rollup Account”
Providers of cloud computing services like Google are equipped to protect millions of users’ data every day – it’s core to how we run our business. Our users enjoy our economies of scale at minimal expense. We also employ some of the world’s best security experts to help to make sure that your data stays safe.
On October 1, join us for a live webcast with some of our top security experts who are on the front lines of fighting spam, malware, and phishing for Google Apps users, designing identity management systems for hosted web apps, and monitoring the Google network for potential threats. Register for this live webcast, “How Google Tackles IT Security – and What You Can Learn From It,” to learn about security in the cloud and get your questions answered by members of Google’s Security team. Participants include:
Eran Feigenbaum – As the Director of Security for Google Apps,Eran Feigenbaumdefines and implements security strategy for Google’s suite of solutions for enterprises. Prior to joining Google in 2007,Eranwas the US Chief Information Security Officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers.
John Flynn – John “Four” Flynn has an extensive background in network monitoring, intrusion detection, and incident response. John currently leads Google’s Security Monitoring program and is a founder of Google’s Security Metrics group.
Bradley Taylor – Gmail’s “Spam Czar,” Brad Taylor leads Gmail’s technical anti-spam, anti-abuse, and email delivery engineering efforts. Brad has played a key role in the development of Gmail’s spam filter since Gmail launched in April, 2004.
Eric Sachs – Eric Sachs has over 15 years of experience with user identity and security for hosted web applications. During his years at Google, he has worked as a Product Manager for many services including Google Accounts, Google Apps, orkut, Google Health, Google Security, and Internal Systems.
While circumstances may vary, most IT departments face similar security challenges. Find out more from the people who confront these issues every day here at Google.
Join us for our live webcast to learn about the people, best practices, and technologies that we have in place to minimize security threats.
