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Are you eager to optimize your conversion rate, but feel a little bit overwhelmed by all of the tools available to help you? Introducing ‘Improving Online Conversions for Dummies’!

We have just released a simple, easy to follow mini book, in conjunction with John Wiley Publications, to help you get a better grasp of the conversion improvement tools offered by Google. Improving Online Conversions for Dummies explains how you can make sure your ads show on searches that are most likely to convert into sales. Understand which ad clicks and impressions lead to conversions, better apportion your marketing…

How many times have you created a new account at a website and seen a message that said: “Thank you for creating an account. To activate your new account, please access your email and click the verification URL provided.”

Even though you just want to start using the website, this lengthy process requires you to manually perform a whole bunch of steps—including switching to your mailbox, trying to find the message the website sent you (which might be in your Spam folder), opening the message, clicking the link, etc. Until recently, we also required people to follow these steps if…

Page organization is an important part of using Google Sites, especially when you want to make a lot of changes to your Site’s structure. To make it easier and save you time, we just enabled drag and drop functionality in the Pages area of site management. Site owners and collaborators can try it out on via Manage site > Pages in the tree view.

We hope you like this little time-saver.

Posted by: Santos Cordon, Software Engineer

We’ve had a lot of famous folks sit down for interviews in the past year, like President Obama, Shakira and Katy Perry, but our next subject, with his tony address and instant name recognition, may have celebrity status that tops all the rest.

Through a partnership with Sesame Street, Elmo will answer your burning questions right here on YouTube. So, moms and dads, if your family has ever wondered, “How exactly do you get, do you get, to Sesame Street?” or whether Oscar’s really as grouchy as he seems, here’s your chance to ask. More…

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This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Recently we introduced powerful, time-saving features in Gmail: Priority Inbox and the ability to call phones right from Gmail. Google spreadsheets added new features, and many more businesses and schools moved to the cloud with Google Apps.

Cut through the clutter with Gmail Priority Inbox
Since its beginning, Gmail has been helping people cope with large amounts of email, whether it’s with more than seven gigabytes of storage,…

For all you “Burners” out there (or those of us who wish we could go this weekend), we’ve just published imagery from Burning Man 2010, captured Wednesday, September 1st by GeoEye’s GeoEye-1 satellite. This annual event, taking place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, celebrates both human individuality and togetherness, highlighted by the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy (“The Man”) Saturday evening. You can find the location of the “The Man” in the center of the annually-built tent city, shown below.

Black Rock Desert tent city (left)
Location of “The Man” (right)

To view this great…

On the Google Analytics API Team, we’re fascinated with what people create using the Data Export API. You guys come up with some really amazing stuff! Lately, we’ve also been paying a lot of attention to how people use it. We looked at whether the API has stumbling points (and where they are), what common features every developer wants in their GA applications, and what tricky areas need deeper explanations than we can give by replying to posts in our discussion group.

As a result of identifying these areas, we’ve written a few in-depth articles. Each article is…

On the Google Analytics API Team, we’re fascinated with what people create using the Data Export API. You guys come up with some really amazing stuff! Lately, we’ve also been paying a lot of attention to how people use it. We looked at whether the API has stumbling points (and where they are), what common features every developer wants in their GA applications, and what tricky areas need deeper explanations than we can give by replying to posts in our discussion group.

As a result of identifying these areas, we’ve written a few in-depth articles. Each article is…

Webmaster Level: All

Now there’s a new way to see just the messages for a specific site. A new Messages feature will appear on all site pages. The feature is just like the Message Center on the home page, except it‘ll show only messages for the currently selected site. This gives you more freedom to choose how you want to view your messages: either for all your sites, or for just one site at a time.

Alerts (formally known as SiteNotice messages) will now be more prominent in the Message Center. These messages tell you about significant changes we’ve…