We want to show you the many ways to take immediate action on the data in this report, so we’ve added a video on tracking internal Site Search to our “Google Analytics in 60 Seconds” series. You can view the video below and learn more about how to make effective use of the internal Site Search information in this article, Five Questions to Ask of Your Site Search Data.

Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

That’s why last year we launched our eCommerce platform for YouTube, which allows users to easily “click-to-buy” products — like songs and movies — related to the content they’re watching on the site. The past few months have demonstrated that great content on YouTube leads to increased sales. For example, when Monty Python launched their channelin November, not only did their YouTube videos shoot to the top of the most viewed lists, but their DVDs also quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Today we’re expanding the program beyond the US and the UK. Links to songs from theiTunes Store will now appear in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, so users from those countries who are drawn to a particular song can easily purchase it. And it’s not limited to tracks on videos uploaded directly by our partners – partners can add these links to videos uploaded by users by using our our Content ID tools to claim videos that match their content. 

We’re also expanding and improving the ways in which these links are displayed. You may start to see click-to-buy links appearing as semi-transparent overlays that appear in the bottom of the video for a short period of time. This increased visibility should help even more people take advantage of this program. 

As we said when we first launched click-to-buy links, this is just the beginning – over time, we’re aiming to open up the program to cover many types of content beyond music. We’ve already experimented with links to purchase DVDs and video games, and we intend to experiment with links to additional types of products soon. 

Happy shopping, 
The YouTube Team

At Live Search, one of the most common questions we receive from our peers at microsoft.com and msn.com is how to optimize their sites for search. But microsoft.com is unlike most other sites on the Internet. It is huge, containing millions of URLs, and is growing all the time. However, large content sites like microsoft.com and msn.com are not the only sites that can have an infinite number of URLs. There are also large ecommerce sites and government agency sites that produce very large numbers of URLs.

As with any site, our original recommendations on how to rank in Live Search are still important. But we’ve given it some thought and wanted to provide some recommendations oriented toward very large sites. Over the next several posts, we will be discussing topics that may help your site, especially if it is very large.

Less is more

By producing lots of content, a site exposes a huge surface area for the search engines to crawl. This can lead to sub-optimal results or underperforming pages. As a site grows, the number of URLs produced will also grow, requiring the search engine bot to dig deeper and work harder. One way to control the growth of URLs is to ensure that you are only exposing one URL per piece of content. This is the process of canonicalization, although it is sometimes referred to as normalization.

Canonicalization encompasses a number of issues related to the selection of the best URL for a page. For most site owners, the issue of canonicalization is a familiar topic because they have selected (or should have selected) the top-level domain they want to point to. For example, the following are all valid ways to get to microsoft.com:

• microsoft.com
• www.microsoft.com
• www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx
• www.microsoft.com/en/us/

For the large site that uses complex URLs for tracking, co-branding, or ecommerce activities, managing canonicalization is a much larger and more important issue. To reduce the risk of duplicate URLs and diluting your link equity, the following are some additional conversions that should be made:

• Add or remove the trailing /

http://www.mysite.com/ to http://www.mysite.com

• Remove the index or default

http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com 
http://www.mysite.com/en/us/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com/en/us

• Avoid CamelCase — convert your text to lower case

http://www.mysite.com/FooBar/ to http://www.mysite.com/foobar

• Remove query string variables or rewrite to readable URLs

http://www.mysite.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99&displaylang=en tohttp://www.mysite.com/downloads/en/family/ab99

• Remove Port Numbers

http://www.mysite.com:8080/ to http://www.mysite.com

• Avoid exposing secure HTTPS version

https://www.mysite.com/en/us/ to http://www.mysite.com/en/us

My URLs are a mess — now what?

The best option for a webmaster is to consider canonicalization when they are planning their site. Unfortunately, many large sites were developed before optimization became an issue. By developing an architecture and site plan that considers canonical forms from the start, such planning will prevent a number of headaches later. But because many site owners already have challenges with canonicalization, here are a few solutions for correcting the situation with existing sites:

301 redirect to the canonical form

For a small site, this can be done fairly easily. However, the more canonical issues your site has, the more complicated the solution will be. The first step is to determine what canonical issues your site suffers from and then build a solution that takes into account both the need to scale and performance requirements.

For some examples of how to do this, I recommend reading Tony Spencer’s article on.htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO.

Use a consistent linking convention

Whatever you choose as your canonical form, never deviate from that form in your sitemap or your internal link structure. For example, always link to mysite.com, rather than sometimes linking to mysite.com/default.htm. You can’t enforce how people link to your site externally, but you should ensure your convention is enforced internally. This can be a long process to enact on a large site, so it may help to start with your most trafficked pages where there is the most impact and work your way through the site to your least important pages.

Don’t link to multiple versions of the page

I recently received a question from a publisher on the issue of co-branding. This is where a site may have multiple versions of a single page that it serves with different brands applied, each with a different URL. For example, the Microsoft download page can be reached directly or from any number of branded pages. The URL for such a download could be read:

• http://downloads.microsoft.com/downloads/EP00688359?id=BA – Brand A skin to the page
• http:// downloads.microsoft.com /downloads/EP00688359?id=BB – Brand B skin
• http:// downloads.microsoft.com /downloads/EP00688359?id=BC – Brand C skin

The content is the same across all the pages other than the brand skin on the page. For a large site like microsoft.com, this means that the same page could be generated over and over, creating additional URLs for the search engine to crawl. The ideal situation in co-branded pages is to have a single page that the search engine bot sees and to block access to any other, branded versions. For a good solution to this problem, Nathan Buggia wrote a very detailed post on how to deal with URL referrer tracking at Jane and Robot. In it, he offers several patterns that will help in this situation and others.

Use absolute links

Once you have done the items above or if you are starting from scratch you may want to consider moving from relative to absolute links. Relative links point a link relative to another page on your server. While there are performance and architectural reasons that webmasters use absolute links, the goal of this exercise is to bring consistency. Absolute links tend to make doing so easier.

A relative link will look like:

“../downloads/EP00688359”

The absolute form will look like:

“http://www.mysite.com/downloads/ep00688359”

While there are other issues that can increase the number of URLs, solving the issue of canonicalization will help both your customers and us at Live Search get more of the URLs that matter.

Coming up next

In our next post on large sites, we will discuss the benefits and implementation of HTTP compression and conditional GET statements. As always, if you have additional questions, feel free to ask in our forums.

Jeremiah Andrick — Program Manager, Live Search Webmaster

Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

(Click to enlarge)

With the new navigation scheme, we’ve added the ability for administrators to rename accounts and profiles directly on that page and have introduced a profile locator functionality to help increase efficiency and ease of account management.

You can also:

• Easily navigate from account to profiles by just clicking on the account name (and back with Overview)
• Better understand the hierarchy relationship between accounts and profiles and quickly find their webproperty ID
• See key loyalty and success metrics for all your accounts and profiles, and sort by any of these metrics
• Use the “Find Profiles” locator box or “starring” functionality to quickly find and navigate to a desired profiles and accounts, regardless of how many there are. No need to sift through pages of irrelevant content.

It’s all about ease of use. For example, now, with a glance, you can determine positive or negative changes in account performance and quickly pull up the reports for a specific account. Additionally, administrators can rename account and profiles directly in the account management interface, without a lot of drilling down.

We hope that the new interface will save you a lot of time. Enjoy!

Posted by Nat Criou, Product Manager, Google Analytics

If you’re just getting started with these resources, we recommend visiting the yellow getting started box in the upper right hand corner of the Submit Your Content homepage. Here, we’ve listed the three steps we recommend all content partners take to begin sharing their content. Alternatively, check out the industry categories where we’ll walk you through the types of content you may have, and show you where that content is visible across various Google services.

We’ve also enabled comments on the Content Central blog, so feel free to visit the blog to suggest topics for future posts or leave your feedback. If you’ve already visited the Submit Your Content site, you may know all about the wonders of RSS, so be sure to subscribe to theContent Central blog’s feed to receive the latest posts when they’re published. Or, enter your email address in the right-hand sidebar to subscribe by email.

Posted by Steffanie Johnson - Content Partnerships Team

Today, we’re pleased to announce the Google Analytics Channel on YouTube, a one-stop source for the latest Google Analytics-related videos. If you’re looking for a beginner’s guide tointerpreting and acting on your data, an introduction to motion charts, or you want to learn how to perform placement targeting in 60 seconds, you can now find it at youtube.com/googleanalytics. And, just to prove that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, we’ll add the occasional music video :)

We’ll continue to listen for what you want to learn about and work on adding useful videos to the channel. If you want to be sure that you always stay up to date, you can subscribe to the Google Analytics Channel or even add an iGoogle gadget to your homepage. 

Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

Delicious Mobile enables you to sign into your account and browse your bookmarks, tags, inbox, and other data. You can also browse popular and recent bookmarks and tags from the Delicious community. This means you can:

• Ditch your phone’s bookmarks — they’re too hard to keep updated, organized, and synchronized. Just use your Delicious bookmarks instead!
• Tag-stalk on the go — use your Network to follow what your friends are reading, no matter where you are.
• Break the tedium — browse the tastiest bookmarks on the Web next time you’re standing in line to buy the new Guns N’ Roses (wait, people still buy CDs?).

Next up on our to-do list is to integrate our social search engine into the mobile site. We welcome your feedback on what you’d like to see in the future, so let us know what you think.

The settings that have been moved to the new Settings page are:
1. Geographic Target 
2. Preferred domain control
3. Opting in to enhanced image search 
4. Crawl rate control 

Changing a Setting
Whenever you change a setting, you will be given an option to save or cancel the change.

Please note: The Save/Cancel option is provided on a per setting basis and hence if you change multiple settings, you’ll have to click the Save button associated with each setting.

Expiration of a setting
Some of the settings are time-bounded. That is, your setting will expire after a certain time period. For example, the crawl rate setting has an expiration period of 90 days. After this period, it’s automatically reset to the default setting. Whenever you visit the Settings page, you can view the date that your setting will expire underneath the setting name.

That’s all there is to it!

We always like adding features and making our interface clearer based on your suggestions, so keep them coming! Please share your feedback (or ask questions) in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst and Nanda Kishore, Webmaster Tools Intern

Googlebot determines the range of crawl rate values you’ll have available in Webmaster Tools. This is based on our understanding of your server’s capabilities. This range may vary from one site to another and across time based on several factors. Setting the crawl rate to a lower-than-default value may affect the coverage and freshness of your site in Google’s search results. However, setting it to higher value than the default won’t improve your coverage or ranking. If you do set a custom crawl rate, the new rate will be in effect for 90 days after which it resets to Google’s recommended value.

Written By Pooja Shah, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools Team

We know that people want to be social on the web, and Friend Connect makes it easy for anyone to sign in to a website, share a little bit about themselves through a personal profile, discover other people with similar interests, invite their contacts, and interact with friends. Even better, you don’t have to deal with the hassle of creating yet another username and password — Friend Connect lets you log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID. Similarly, you can choose to either establish a new profile or use profiles and friend sources from other social networks that have opened up their services, like Plaxo and orkut. To learn more, watch the video tour below:

We launched Friend Connect as a preview release in May, and since then we have been working closely with a handful of website owners, social networks, and application developers to improve its speed and scalability, ease of use, and customization capabilities. We’ve also expanded the features available to users with richer, more integrated profiles and new ways to discuss and share content, like including YouTube videos in your comments.

Friend Connect’s goal is to facilitate an open social web. Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit. Additionally, websites that use Friend Connect become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community.

In the coming months, we’re excited to see more webmasters add Friend Connect to their sites, helping their visitors engage with each other across the web.

To learn more, please visit www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager

The first is the creation of a “Recent Activity” box on your YouTube channel. This box will provide your viewers with a snapshot of recent changes you’ve made to your public channel, making your channel more dynamic, fresh and timely. For example, if you recently added a new favorite to your channel, visitors can find this favorite in the new Recent Activity box (as well as in the usual “Favorites” box). The Recent Activity box will also consolidate the separate “My Recent Ratings” and “My Recent Comments” boxes into this single activity window. 

As always, we give you maximum control over how your channel is configured on the channel design page. And now, the Recent Activity privacy settings page (also available in the upper-right corner of the Recent Activity box) lets you choose what activity you want to appear in the Recent Activity box. It’s important to note that we’ve set your initial Recent Activity settings according to what you already publicly show on your channel today - so, for example, if you’re not already showing the Favorites box on your channel, then the Recent Activity box won’t suddenly start showing new favorites you make. 

Regarding bulletins, we’ve listened to you, and most of you didn’t see the value in bulletins as they are today. So, we’re taking a first step to make bulletins more useful. Although the bulletin box will be going away, now you can broadcast a bulletin directly to your channel visitors in your Recent Activity box. This not only provides a fun place to shout out personal updates and news, but also provides an additional way to communicate and engage with your channel’s fans. 

We hope you like these changes, and are always eager to hear your feedback - so please feel free to share your thoughts with us! 

The YouTube Team

Starting today, you’ll see prompts for Facebook Connect at websites across the Internet and have the opportunity to take your Facebook profile information, friends and privacy preferences to your favorite sites. 
If you’ve used the early versions of Connect on Citysearch, CNN’s The Forum or CBS’ The Insider, this will already look pretty familiar.

For example, you can use Facebook Connect with the reviews website, Citysearch. You can easily log in using your Facebook account, and from there, you’ll be able to interact with all of your Facebook friends. They’ll be able to see some of the same profile information they can see on Facebook, which is fully controlled by your privacy settings. When you write a review for a restaurant, you’ll have the option to publish that story back to Facebook, where your friends can see it, too. This makes finding your friends’ reviews on Citysearch a snap. With Facebook Connect, it will be easier for you to share and connect with your friends across the Web.

We’ve worked hand in hand with our launch partners over the past several months to create great experiences for you to check out. Use your Facebook account to comment on blogs includingTechCrunch. Compare your political stance with friends at CNN’s The Forum and your voting record via Govit. Comment on the latest how-to videos on Howcast. Get your friends’ opinions regarding your new car search with vLane. 

Obviously our launch partners don’t cover all the websites you use on a daily basis, so if you want to see this list grow, get in touch with your favorite websites, developers, and services, and tell them you want to connect. With your help, we can all share more information across the web.

Fix issues on your site

In our August release, we shipped our Crawl Issues tool, which allows you to see any issues that Live Search found on your site. In this release, we have updated this tool to include any malware that we have found associated with your site.

Malware (short for malicious software) is those nasty bits of code downloaded to a computer without the consent of the user. Some malware is just intrusive, but most is very harmful. As Live Search crawls the Web, it finds many pages infected with malware. We flag all pages containing or linking to detected malware with a “Malware” warning message in the search engine results page and disable the link to the page to protect customers.

As a site owner, having malware on your site, or even just linking to other sites whose pages contain malware, can harm your customers. At a minimum, this may prevent your customers from being able to access the content on your site from search results pages.

With the updated Crawl Issues tool in Webmaster Center, you will be able to:

• Determine whether any malware has been detected on any of your webpages.
• Download offline-accessible reports detailing which webpages on your website are affected by the detected malware.

Protect your customers

One of the biggest dangers to searchers on the Web today is a maliciously hijacked website that injects malware onto a user’s computer. Oftentimes, this happens when the site with the malware download is a trusted site. When you link out to other sites you trust, you typically have no way of knowing if those site owners are actually keeping their sites secured and free of malware. As the owner of a site, you want to protect your customers from this kind of malware.

Since our first launch, we have offered you the ability review your site’s outbound links. Now we offer you the ability to filter those outbound links to those that specifically link to pages infected with malware. By reviewing this list and removing the bad links, you can prevent the users of your site from accidentally installing software that is harmful to their computers.

With the updated Outbound Links tool in Webmaster Center, you will be able to:

• Determine whether any malware has been detected on any of your outbound links.
• Download offline-accessible reports detailing which webpages on your website contain links to external pages containing detected malware.

With the updated tools in Webmaster Center, if you have any malware issues on either your own pages or on outbound links, you will be able to:

• Identify the affected pages quickly and easily.
• Read helpful advice in Help on how to fix the problem.
• Submit a request, once you have cleaned up the malware, asking the Live Search support team to re-scan your website and remove the malware warning flags from any affected webpages in the Live Search results webpage. Instead of waiting for the next search engine cycle of re-crawling your website, this new, user-requested re-inclusion process should take days, not weeks, to resolve.

Easier Authentication

For the past year, we have heard from webmasters that authenticating their sites was a difficult and sometimes limiting process. For large site owners or those with many domains, it can be hard to manage all the authorization codes for your sites. In this update, we have simplified the authentication process by allowing you to use one authentication code for all your sites. In addition, you no longer need to specify between XML or HTML authentication methods for each registered site. You need only to add an authentication code to the site and we will check for both methods automatically.

During the process of adding a new site, you will be able to download your custom XML authentication file or just print off the page with the code on it and hand it off to your development team for implementation.

If you previously had an account with the Webmaster Center and used unique authentication codes for each site, we will continue to support your current authentication codes and methods.

Here to lend a helping hand

When we launched our Webmaster Center, we also launched a few resources to help you engage with us. With every release, we want to encourage you to participate in the Live Search Webmaster Center community to get help. Our Forum and Webmaster Center blog are there to provide support for web publishers like you, across a broad range of issues, focused on helping you be successful. We are always listening for your feedback.

So sign in today and let us know what you think!

-Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager, Live Search Webmaster Center

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.

Watch our lead engineer, Amay, demonstrate a few ways to use SearchWiki in this short video:

This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives. We have been testing bits and pieces of SearchWiki for some time through live experiments, and we incorporated much of our learnings into this release. We are constantly striving to improve our users’ search experience, and this is yet another step along the way.

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager, and Corin Anderson, Software Engineer

In addition, based on your feedback, we made improvements to the display ad builder to enable greater customization and make building display ads even easier:

Image picker: You can now choose from previously uploaded images when creating your ads.

Real-time editing: See what your text and other customization edits look like, automatically — without having to click the ‘update preview’ button.

Quicker way of seeing available ad sizes: You can see which sizes your ad can run in for each ad template without having to complete the ad creation process. You can also preview how your customization choices affect each size.

Additional templates: Choose from even more templates for customizing your ads.

We think these improvements will help you more easily and efficiently create engaging display ads. As always, we welcome your suggestions on how we can improve the display ad builder.

Next week, we’ll post best practices to help you build effective ads with the display ad builder. In the meantime, you can view our tutorial video or visit the display ad builder site to learn more.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Once you’ve installed Sync, all your information will be safe in your Google account. If you ever lose your phone or buy a new one, getting your address book and calendar to your new device is as easy as installing Sync. Current and new Google Sync users can try Google Sync today by visiting m.google.com/sync from their BlackBerry browser.

Posted by Marcus Foster, Product Manager, Google Mobile

I’ll admit there doesn’t seem a direct causal connection between the perceived relevance of your landing page and the quality of your search ad. That’s why Microsoft hired Enquiro Research for a project earlier this year to better understand the impact of ad quality. Enquiro used eye tracking to directly measure user engagement. Turns out that the interaction between searcher, search ad and landing page is pretty complex.

In 8 seconds I’ll either be gone or give you
the opportunity to sell me on the next click.

Let’s paint the picture. You have 8 seconds or less to convince me that your landing page is relevant to my interests. In 8 seconds I’ll have made up my mind. In 8 seconds I’ll either be gone or give you the opportunity to sell me on the next click.

That’s not a lot of time to make a conscious decision. In fact, a lot of the decision I’m making isn’t conscious at all. It takes place under the hood. Sparks are igniting and pistons firing beyond my awareness or control despite the fact that I think I’m steering the car. Enquiro’s research suggests that one of the clues I’m using to make my decision about your landing page is the quality of your ad. The aftertaste of a bad ad is lower perceived relevance of your landing page.

Even a bad ad can be good enough to get a click sometimes. In fact, really bad ads can generate more traffic than really good ads, it’s just not the kind of traffic you want. There’s little return on your advertising budget. So what makes a bad ad? You’re likely to recognize one immediately - if it’s not your own. A bad ad isn’t specific. It doesn’t speak directly to the searcher’s intent. It’s vague and unconvincing. And often it’s the result of an advertiser trying to cover too many diverse keywords with the same generic copy.

A bad ad will make a good landing page worse
but a good ad has less ability to make a bad page better.

So what’s a good ad?

• Clear, specific, concise
• Relevant to the searcher’s goals
• Reflects the searcher’s keywords in sensible ad copy
• Communicates the landing page’s value proposition
• Incorporates a strong call to action

A bad ad will make a good landing page worse but a good ad has less ability to make a bad page better. It’s one of those life lessons we all learn. Bad news has longer legs and travels faster. That makes it even more important to marry a good ad with a good landing page. But what describes a good landing page?

• Your visitor arrives at the promised content or with one, but no more than two, clicks
• Your content is unique and informative
• Your content is directly relevant to the searcher’s keywords
• Your site has some reason for existence besides advertising

What can you do to identify a bad ad? There’s a simple, nearly foolproof metric: bounce rate. Well, it would be simple if every publisher of web analytics software measured bounce rate the same way.

Identify where your search advertising budget is hemorrhaging.

Bounce rate can be defined either as a) only one page viewed by a visitor in a single visit, no matter how long the visit, or b) only one page viewed by a visitor in a visit that lasts typically 10 seconds or less. It’s the second metric we want to track.

Segmenting your traffic by search engine campaign, ad group, and ad can help you identify where your search advertising budget is hemorrhaging. Each click is costing you money, each bounce is a lost opportunity. Once you identify your worst ads, fix them.

• Rewrite you ad copy
• Use negative keywords
• Reorganize ad groups with keywords having tightly related meanings
• Use geographic and demographic targeting, when appropriate
• Use dayparting (with the same caveat)

Monitor your bounce rate per ad. If the bounce rate declines, keep the change. If not, discard it. Develop a hypothesis to better understand both. Test your hypothesis against your bounce rate to see if you’re right.

You’re not only learning what works in search advertising, you’re practicing the scientific method!

So what can you do to ensure your ad units get noticed? Place your ads where users are likely to look.

We’ve also made a heatmap to show you where the best placements are on a typical page. Great positions include:

• Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)
• At the end of an article
• Aligned with content

But don’t just take our word for it - every website is different. Make sure you use your judgment of how visitors interact with your pages to determine good ad placements. Position your ads so that they’re visible, but be careful of intruding on the experience of your site’s visitors. Most of all, think like a user and you’ll be able to balance your website’s content with a successful ad strategy.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

But we went a few steps further. You can also:

• Select from predefined custom segments such as “Paid Traffic”, “Visits with Conversions”or “New Visits”
• Use an autocomplete function and a drag and drop interface to easily create segments
• Apply a segment to all historical traffic

And instead of making it just something that the top 5% of users can figure out how to use, we decided to try to make it something that even your boss can master without having to get his twelve year old daughter to teach him…or bother you for that matter. We think you’re going to love it. Segments allow you to look at the abundance of data in Google Analytics as it pertains to one or more segments of visitors who are important to you.

But we went a few steps further. You can also:

• Select from predefined custom segments such as “Paid Traffic”, “Visits with Conversions”or “New Visits”
• Use an autocomplete function and a drag and drop interface to easily create segments
• Apply a segment to all historical traffic

And instead of making it just something that the top 5% of users can figure out how to use, we decided to try to make it something that even your boss can master without having to get his twelve year old daughter to teach him…or bother you for that matter. We think you’re going to love it. Segments allow you to look at the abundance of data in Google Analytics as it pertains to one or more segments of visitors who are important to you.

But let’s back up and take a real dive in.

For starters, what is a segment?
Most of you probably know that a segment is a subset of your data. Usually, it refers to a subset of visitors whose behavior you would like to see and analyze. For instance, usually you are looking at all visits to your site. You may want to analyze only the “Paid Traffic” or “Visits with Conversions” or “Organic traffic” segments and even compare these segments side by side in reports. Advanced Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze these subsets of your traffic.

Of course, you’ve always been able use the “Dimension” drop down menu to segment one report within Google Analytics by one variable, such as campaign or browser type. But many of you need the ability to create custom segments. To accomplish this, you needed to create a filtered profile. The shortcoming of this approach was that you had to leave the reporting interface to create the profile - and once you created it, it only segmented future traffic. With Advanced Segmentation, however, you can create segments while you browse your reports and the segments you create apply to historical data as well as current and future traffic.

How do I create an Advanced Segment?
So, you’re ready to define segments and apply them to your reports instead of creating separate profiles and applying filters. Good! As Avinash says, “Analyzing data in aggregate is a crime against humanity.” To get started, click the drop down menu in the control bar at the top right of any report next to the text “Advanced Segments.” (Click any image below to enlarge it.)

This drop down allows you to apply a pre-defined segment clicking a checkbox right there without leaving the report. Here’s what it looks like:

Simply select the segment or segments you want - in this case, we’ve selected two right off the bat: “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors” - click “Apply” in the bottom right, and presto! The segments are applied to all of your reports. And you can un-apply them just as easily - by unchecking them in the drop down menu.

Where do I see the segment in my reports?
Once you apply a segment, you’ll see it reflected throughout all reports in the profile. And just to mention it again, it acts upon all data — even historical data. Don’t worry about harming your data; there are no permanent segments.

Here’s a screenshot of a regular over-time graph in a report that has the segments we applied above:

As you can see, the blue line denotes All Visitors, the orange line denotes New Visitors, and the green line is Returning Visitors. And the same segments are shown in the data below the graph. In addition, if you click on any other reports, such as Content or Goal Conversions, you’ll be analyzing the same segments there as well.

Can I create a customized Segment?
Yes! Another way to work with segments is to go to the “Manage Your Advanced Segments” page which is linked to in the drop down menu mentioned above, where you can actually create, apply, edit, or delete segments. It is also linked to in the drop down box or by clicking on the “Advanced Segments” link in the left navigation. Or you can go directly to the “Create a New Advanced Segment” page where you build your custom segment.

In the Manage area, you can select from the same default segments already mentioned, or create a new custom segment (link in the upper right).

When you choose to create a custom segment, you’ll easily create it using a use the drag-and-drop segment builder. You can search for a “dimension” or “metric” in the field at the top, or find it in the menu and drag and drop it into the box in the work area in the middle of the screen. Here is what you’ll start with:

You’ll choose segments on the left and combine them using AND or OR statements as well as conditions and values. It’s just like writing a sentence. The key is to first imagine what segment you’d like to see. For instance, we’re doing some marketing in a new AdWords campaign for our website, googlestore.com, and we want to isolate that segment and look at it across reports. The campaign is called Google Store: English - Americas. So the segment we want in plain English is roughly, “AdWords campaign that is called “Google Store: English - Americas”.

Well, first of all, we know that AdWords campaigns are under Traffic Sources. So we’ll find it on the left and drag it into the work area:

Then, it couldn’t be easier to select the campaign we want, because it the choices are autopopulated to include only the available choices. In the middle, we’ve set the condition, “Matches Exactly”. Take a look:

Then, you can click “Test Segment” to make sure you have some data, and you’re ready to name your segment at bottom and click “Create Segment.”

And just like that, you’re slicing and dicing your data down to the segment you want. But you’ve just scratched the surface. You can make much more complex and nested segments with the same ease. Watch this video to learn how it works, or read How do I create an Advanced Segment.

How does a segment help me?
You may recall a previous blog post about using filtered profiles to isolate segments of traffic. Setting up roughly 10 profiles and implementing a filter on each was a bit of a process, but a very handy one for testing theories and identifying specific segment behavior. Now, with Advanced Segmentation, you can do all this in a few mouseclicks, and without creating additional profiles.

Remember Advanced Segments leave your original data untouched. And, while filters modify data on the pageview level, Advanced Segments change a report’s view of the data at the visit level.

One technique for getting the most out of segments is to use them to test potential goals or campaigns. For instance, you can segment traffic to one page or even a funnel of pages leading to a potential goal page, and then look at all the metrics that brought traffic to that page, including new vs. returning visitors, incoming traffic sources, keywords, geographic locations, browser types, and more. Another segment you can create is one for branded keywords - ones that include your company name or core competency - to get a holistic sense of your business’s web presence over time.

Another technique is to create simple segments and compare them, such as an organic search segment vs. a paid search segment to see what keywords you may want to buy, or which ones are bringing lots of high value organic traffic that you can drop from your pay-per-click keyword list.

Get specific!
But the real magic of Advanced Segments is when you want to look at all your Google Analytics reports and metrics for a very specific subsection of visitors. For instance, you’ve just released an additional product - a new piece of software for instance - and want to compare traffic and conversions coming from Boston as opposed to San Francisco so you can figure out where to physically stock the product or where to focus your location targeted campaigns. You may want to further segment to see only paid traffic coming from these cities who have converted, so that you can confidently allocate your marketing budget towards campaigns with higher ROI. You can even show two campaigns segments side by side comparison. This is a great way to test experiments before ramping a campaign up to full spend.

There you go. Now, you’re primed to create segments, and you should go crazy with them. Just so you know, this is not the death of filters. You still may need to create certain filters, such as a search and replace filter, to modify data for your purposes. But for simplification of multi-variable analysis, including geographic, demographic and browsing behavior, Advanced Segmentation is a powerful and easy to use tool and we think a large segment of you will find it really, really useful AND easy to use AND fun to use OR illuminating.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

For a business running their own website, this means that visitors who turn to search expect to have access to the newest products, pages and announcements a site has to offer.

That’s why today we’re excited to bring you On-Demand Indexing for Google Site Search. On-Demand Indexing is like a turbocharger for Google Site Search, ensuring that your newest pages appear in search results on your website fast. Whether you’re promoting a new line of products, sharing breaking news or reports, or updating your site in time for the holiday season, On-Demand Indexing puts businesses in control with an “Index Now” button, giving them the flexibility to quickly update search results whenever they have new content to update or add.

Google Site Search builds on the Google Custom Search Engine by adding business integration features, the option to turn off ads, a more customized look and feel, as well as email and phone support. Check out this video to learn more:

Today, we’re taking another step towards improving your experience with Google webmaster services with the launch of On-Demand Indexing in Custom Search. With On-Demand Indexing, you can now tell us about the pages on your websites that are new, or that are important and have changed, and Custom Search will instantly schedule them for crawl, and index and serve them in your CSEs usually within 24 hours, often much faster.

How do you tell us about these URLs? You guessed it… provide a Sitemap to Webmaster Tools, like you always do, and tell Custom Search about it. Just go to the CSE control panel, click on the Indexing tab, select your On-Demand Sitemap, and hit the “Index Now” button. You can tell us which of these URLs are most important to you via the priority and lastmod attributes that you provide in your Sitemap. Each CSE has a number of pages allocated within the On-Demand Index, and with these attributes, you can us which are most important for indexing. If you need greater allocation in the On-Demand index, as well as more customization controls, Google Site Search provides a range of options.

Some important points to remember:

1. You only need to submit your Sitemaps once in Webmaster Tools. Custom Search will automatically list the Sitemaps submitted via Webmaster Tools and you can decide which Sitemap to select for On-Demand Indexing.
2. Your Sitemap needs to be for a website verified in Webmaster Tools, so that we can verify ownership of the right URLs.
3. In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. You can use “Webmaster Tools > Crawl Errors > URLs restricted by robots.txt” or check your robots.txt file to ensure that you’re not blocking us from crawling these pages.
4. Submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com.

We hope you’ll use this feature to inform us regularly of the most important changes on your sites, so we can respond quickly and get those pages indexed in your CSE. As always, we’re always listening for your feedback on Custom Search.

Written by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

*Please note that no leopards were harmed in the making of this video!

Over the years, we’ve seen some colourful ad unit designs. Some publishers design ad units that contrast with their site so that they stand out. Although this can work in some cases, we’ve found that ad units that match your site’s design tend to perform better in terms of revenue and click-through-rate. Users are more likely to read ads when they’re well integrated into your site.

When you design your AdSense ads, keep these tips in mind:

• Use colours that either blend with or complement your site’s colours. Make the ads a part of your site.
• Use lighter colours for borders, or no border at all.
• Try rotating colours or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.
• Save sets of frequently-used colours as a palette.

So give your ad design and colours some thought, and you’ll notice the difference!

Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

While this blog tends to focus on consumer applications of Google Mobile products, many of our products are used by business people to find information essential to their jobs. Perhaps you use a BlackBerry issued by your company. If you do, hopefully you search the web with Google and get directions using Google Maps. Your BlackBerry is likely administered by IT managers who whitelist what software you can install on the device. In many cases, IT managers haven’t whitelisted Google Maps for mobile or other Google Mobile applications.

If you are an IT manager, visit http://mobile.google.com/enterprise to learn how to give your staff Google Mobile applications. The new installation packages allow you to place the Maps for mobile binaries on an internal server, or push the application to your employees via BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

If you don’t manage information technology at your company, consider asking your IT department to deploy Google Maps and Web Search on all the company phones.

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile

• High-quality start images (thumbnails) – Before you press play on embedded YouTube videos, the thumbnails for the video will be presented in high-quality. We’re pleased with the results – let us know if you agree.
• Search in embeddable player – At the close of an embedded video, along with the usual recommended videos and URLs, a search box will appear. Not only will you be able search from within the embedded player, you will be able to watch videos through the same window. That’s right, you can search all of YouTube from the comfort of your favorite blog, news, or humor page.
• Integrated video annotations – Annotations enable video producers to incorporate text information into their videos, create choose your own adventure-style stories or add links to any YouTube video. People watching videos through the embedded player can now join the fun.
• Integrated closed captions – Back in August we started allowing video creators to add captions to their videos. Closed Captions are now available in embedded videos like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRS8MkLhQmM

Our open APIs and embeddable players allow more and more people to transform the way they distribute and enjoy videos while avoiding the traditional cost and hassle of hosting videos. We look forward to seeing the fun and creative ways you will use these new features.

Have fun,
The YouTube Team

This week, we’re recommending you think big - big ad units, that is:

Publishers often ask us what the best ad sizes are to include in their site’s design, and we always point them to these three:

• 300x250 medium rectangle
• 728x90 leaderboard
• 160x600 skyscraper

These ad units have proven in the past to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you’ve receiving all ad types, you’ll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they’re interested in.

When you’re considering how to design your site, our testing has shown that displaying at least one of these ad formats on your page can increase your AdSense earnings potential. So remember, sometimes bigger is better!

Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

Today, we’re pleased to announce the addition of a new “Data Quality” tab in your Google Base account. On this tab, you’ll find a host of suggestions for improving the quality of the item listings in your product feed. For example, you can find recommendations on the length of your title and description fields, or get a snapshot of the number of items in your feed that are missing key attributes. By addressing these issues, you’ll be able to improve the quality of your feeds and help more shoppers find your products.

We hope you’re as excited about this new tab as we are, and that you’ll find the recommendations helpful.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

We hope that by now you’ve found the AdSense Help Forum to be the best place to ask questions and share tips with other AdSense publishers. We’ve been listening to your feedback about forum features you’d like to see, and we’re excited to announce that we’re moving the English Forum from Google Groups to a brand new platform. (For those who participate in the Forum in another language: rest assured that our engineers are working on making this new platform available in additional languages, although we don’t have a set date at this time.)

As of today, we’ve closed up shop and moved the English Forum next door to the AdSense Help Center. We’ve been jealous of the Help Center for a while now. Its innovative interface, clear categories, and snazzy search powered by CSE left us feeling like the odd man out.

Now we’ve almost got it all. We have the look and feel of the Help Center with the same CSE to search across the Forum, the Help Center, and the blog. We have the same categories as the Help Center, so you can easily transition from one category to the another. We even have some extra things we hope you’ll really like: a system of levels to reward your contributions to the Forum, and profiles where you can put a picture next to your name. You can subscribe to the Forum (or to individual discussions) by RSS feed. You can post a question and receive your answer by email. You can even vote on which response best answers the question and mark a best answer to a question you asked.

We hope you’ll come take a look, and we hope you’ll stay a while, sign into your Google Account, and ask and answer questions.

Posted by the AdSensePro Team - AdSense Help Forum Support

More precise Quality Score calculation
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.

In the coming days, we’ll update the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounts for ad position. This will result in more accurate Quality Scores, ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, and enable Google to show the most relevant ads to searchers by rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

Higher quality ads above the search results
We’re also improving the way we determine which ads show in the yellow region above the search results. These positions are particularly valuable to advertisers because they are prominently positioned on the page. Given their prominence, it’s especially important that these ads be high quality; we therefore place extra emphasis on quality when determining which ads to show in this location.

To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so. For instance, suppose the ad in position 1 on the right side of the page doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score to appear above the search results, but the ad in position 2 does. It’s now possible for the number 2 ad to jump over the number 1 ad and appear above the search results. This change ensures that quality plays an even more important role in determining the ads that show in those prominent positions.

Keep in mind that these enhancements may cause changes to your ad position, spend, and performance. We’re launching these updates soon so that you’ll have enough time to review your accounts and prepare for your holiday season advertising. While we don’t believe that any immediate changes are needed on your part, we encourage you, as always, to watch your key metrics and to make adjustments as appropriate.

We’ll post again once these changes are live.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Christian Yee, Inside AdWords crew

The Google product taxonomy is a tree of categories that describe product families, with verticals (Electronics, Home & Garden, etc.) at the highest level, followed by more specific product families or products within these broad categories (such as Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders > MP3 Players).

If you already have a system of categorization of your own, you may also use that. Just include the full category path as the value for the product_type attribute (e.g., Books > Non-Fiction > Sports > Baseball).

We hope that this new taxonomy provides you with more suggestions on how to accurately describe your items, so that you can help even more shoppers find your products! For more information on our taxonomy and instructions on how to format the product_type attribute, please read this Help Center article.

Posted by: Weiying Li, Google Base Support

By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site. In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you’ll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.

We’ve highlighted a few ways to use the integrated metrics below, but we encourage you to be creative! Come up with your own to discover how useful (and fun) new data can be:

• Discover untapped markets. Use the geographies report to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
• Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Use the ‘Referring sites’ report to determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
• Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site’s AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.

Again, this feature is not yet available to all our publishers, but please keep checking your account for an invitation. In the meantime, you can take a look at our demo to learn more about the reports you’ll have access to:

Posted by Vineesha Malkani - AdSense Publisher Support

Today at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C., after months of development and testing, Avinash Kaushik, our Analytics Evangelist, unveiled the new functionalities that represent a major upgrade to Google Analytics. With these features, gradually being released in beta in all accounts, you’ll gain much richer insights into your website traffic, and it’ll be even easier to discover, create, and access the metrics important to you.

They are (with more details below): Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, a data export API (private beta), integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta), multi-dimensional data visualizations called “Motion Charts,” and an updated user and administrative interface.

These are features that experts and enterprise-level customers demand, and they will be available and easy to use in your Google Analytics reports. Please see below for details on each new feature and the release schedule letting you know when you can expect to have access to them. Here is a screenshot showing you where in your reports you can find a few of the new features, with more screenshots, help center links, and video demos (also at this YouTube playlist) below.

.

Features being added to all accounts in the coming weeks:

Advanced Segmentation enables you to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic. It is true on-the-fly segmentation of visits so that you can create powerful filters with a few mouse-clicks. Select from predefined custom segments such as “Paid Traffic” and “Visits with Conversions” or create new custom segments with a flexible, easy-to-use segment builder. Then, you can apply one or more of these segments to current or historical data, and even compare segment performance side by side in reports.

Learn how to create an advanced segment in the video below, and in this help center article:

*Also, Avinash has just posted a blog on how to use Advanced Segmentation which is a must-read to quickly learn how to take advantage of this powerful feature.

Custom Reports are reports you create, save, and edit to give you a specific view of your data. You can choose the information and metrics you want to see, organized in the way you want to see it, by using a drag and drop interface to populate an Analytics report. You can also create tabs if you want to see related data - similar to a “Goal Conversions” tab - in effect creating multiple levels of sub-reports.

Once created, each custom report is available for as long as you want it. Take a look at this quick start guide to Custom Reports and to see a demo, play this video:

Motion Charts add sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how they interact over time.

By comparing metrics visually over time you can expose data relationships that would be difficult to see in traditional reports. Motion Charts will be available through a new “Visualize” button at the top of reports.

Take a look at this help center article and watch this video for more information:

(Note: if you’re interesting in putting your own data in motion, you can also use a Motion Chart gadget in Google Spreadsheets or a visualization API.)

The New Account Management Dashboard makes it easier for you to manage and monitor your account by providing simpler navigation between accounts and profiles and displaying a dashboard of key performance metrics upfront upon login.

Meaningful data and clear visual cues (green is good, red is bad) help alert you to areas requiring more attention. We hope the new navigation, administrators’ ability to rename accounts and profiles, and account/profile locator functionality will boost your efficiency and ease of account management. Learn more in this help center article.

Features currently in private beta, scheduled for a more gradual full release to all accounts:

The Data Export API enables you to create software programs and applications using all read-only report level data from Analytics. The data exported can be used in any number of ways, such as building custom dashboards, creating data visualizations or interfaces, performing offline analysis, and combining/mashing Analytics data with other data sources. The API will be a platform for developers to extend Analytics data in new and practical ways, as far as can be imagined and implemented.

Integrated Reporting with AdSense lets AdSense publishers see their revenue and impression data alongside their site traffic data in Analytics. Take a look at the AdSense blog for more details. This integration will give publishers even more metrics to help them measure visitor activity and the performance of ad units, as well as discover areas of revenue potential on their websites.

Learn how to link your AdSense account with a Google Analytics account, and for a glimpse at the new reports, take a look at this video:

If you don’t already, you’ll soon have access to these new features. Once you get a chance to use them, we invite you to discuss them and give us feedback in our user forum. We hope you’ll find them useful and intuitive.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics

…Okay, not exactly. But we will be looking into what a “website” means in the context of Webmaster Tools, what kind of sites you can add to your Webmaster Tools account, and what data you can get from different types of sites.

Why should you care? Well, the following are all questions that we’ve gotten from webmasters recently:

• “I know my site has lots of incoming links; why don’t I see any in my Webmaster Tools account?”
• “I see sitelinks for my site in Google’s search results, but when I look in Webmaster Tools it says ‘No sitelinks have been generated for your site.’”
• “Why does my Top search queries report still say ‘Data is not available at this time’? My site has been verified for months.”

In each of these cases, the answer was the same: the data was there, but the webmaster was looking at the wrong “version” of their domain in Webmaster Tools.

A little background

The majority of tools and settings in Webmaster Tools operate on a per-site basis. This means that when you’re looking at, say, the Top search queries report, you’re only seeing the top search queries for a particular site. Looking at the top queries for www.example.com will show you different data than looking at the top queries for www.example.org. Makes sense, right?

Not all websites have URLs in the form www.example.com, though. Your root URL may not include the www subdomain (example.com); it may include a custom subdomain (rollergirl.example.com); or your site may live in a subfolder, for example if it’s hosted on a free hosting site (www.example.com/rollergirl/). Since we want webmasters to be able to access our tools regardless of how their site is hosted, you can add any combination of domain, subdomain(s), and/or subfolder(s) as a “site” on your Webmaster Tools dashboard. Once you’ve verified your ownership of that site, we’ll show you the information we have for that particular piece of the web, however big or small it may be. If you’ve verified your domain at the root level, we’ll show you data for that whole domain; if you’ve only verified a particular subfolder or subdomain, we’ll only show you data for that subfolder or subdomain. Take Blogger as an example—someone who blogs with Blogger should only be able to have access to the data for their own subdomain (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), not the entire blogspot.com domain.

What some people overlook is the fact that www is actually a subdomain. It’s a very, very common subdomain, and many sites serve the same content whether you access them with or without the www; but the fact remains that example.com and www.example.com are two different URLs and have the potential to serve different content. For this reason, they’re considered different sites in Webmaster Tools. Since they’re different sites—just like www.example.com andwww.example.org—they can have different data. When you’re looking at the data forwww.example.com (with the www subdomain) you’re not seeing the data for example.com (without the subdomain), and vice versa.

What can I do to make sure I’m seeing all my data?

• If you feel like you’re missing some data, add both the www and the non-www version of your domain to your Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at the data for both sites.
• Do a site: search for your domain without the www (e.g. [site:example.com]). This should return pages from your domain and any of your indexed subdomains (www.example.com,rollergirl.example.com, etc.). You should be able to tell from the results whether your site is mainly indexed with or without the www subdomain. The version that’s indexed is likely to be the version that shows the most data in your Webmaster Tools account.
• Tell us whether you prefer for your site to be indexed with or without the www by setting your preferred domain.
• Let everyone else know which version you prefer by doing a site-wide 301 redirect.

Even though example.com and www.example.com may look like identical twins, any twins will be quick to tell you that they’re not actually the same person. Now that you know, we urge you to give both your www and non-www sites some love in Webmaster Tools, and—as usual—to post any follow-up questions in our Webmaster Help Group.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Last month my colleague Libby Thomas wrote an introduction to Dynamic Text Insertion. You may remember she mentioned that a study has shown that inserting the exact keyword into a paid listing improves CTR by 38% on average.

Keyword Insertion

With adCenter, the easiest way to include the search term is through {keyword} insertion. This function allows you to drop the term from the search box straight into your ad. But what if inserting the keyword would take you over the 25 character limit for titles or the 70 character limit for descriptions?

Default Text

You can define default text for use with {keyword}. The default text is then used in your ad whenever the ad would otherwise exceed character limits. You can also use default text with {param1}, {param2} and {param3}.

If your ad title is “{keyword} in Stock Now” and one of your {keyword} variables is “Mountain Bike Parts,” the resulting ad title, “Mountain Bike Parts in Stock Now,” would exceed the character limit for ad titles. As a result, your ad would not be displayed.

However, by using default text in your ad title, you can keep your ad text within the allowable character limit. If your ad title is “{keyword:Bike parts} in Stock Now” and someone searches by using your keyword “mountain bike parts,” your ad title would be displayed as “Bike parts in Stock Now”.

Photo
http://adcentercommunity.com/blogs/advertiser_drafts/WindowsLiveWriter/KeywordInsertionwithDefaultText_8D6F/image_3.png So now that you know how to use Keyword Insertion with Default Text, why not give it a try and see how much your CTR increases?

Thanks for reading,

Phil

Use the Analytics Funnel Visualization report to improve conversions

• Learn how many shoppers drop out during each step of your shopping cart conversion process.
• Then, work on the steps that lose the most customers.
• Website Optimizer, our free testing tool, is a great way to improve those key pages.

Geo-target your AdWords campaigns through Analytics

• Find out where your most profitable customers are coming from, and direct your advertising dollars to target customers in those areas.
  
• Get data for region-specific keyword performance in your Analytics account.
  
• Create more targeted AdWords campaigns by region. Watch this video for a step-by-step demo.

Submit your products to Google Product Search

• Google Product Search enables shoppers to search for and find products to buy online, and enables you to submit your products for free and target users shopping on Google. Google Product Search is currently available to merchants in the U.S., U.K., and Germany.
• If you’ve never used Google Product Search, you can start submitting your products using feeds you’ve already prepared for other shopping engines.

Visit our Google page on holiday success to see a full list of tips. We hope these tips and tools help you make the most of your holiday season!

- Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’re turning on Citysearch and Zagat SearchMonkeyapplications for all users. Together with the Yelp and Yahoo! Local Enhanced Results, as well as theYahoo! Shortcut at the top of the search page, finding local businesses on Yahoo! Search is faster and more intuitive than ever before.

For example, Citysearch’s app provides ratings, hours of operation, addresses and phone numbers for millions of restaurants directly on the search results page. It also includes deep links to each restaurant’s profile, user-generated reviews and a map, so users can get directly to the answer they’re seeking. To see the app in action, try a search for slanted door san francisco or cones new york.

We’ve also seen the number and quality of applications in the Yahoo! Search Gallery continue to climb and improve. Here are a couple recent additions we particularly like:

Take a look at the recently developed Infobar for TV.com. The app displays the next air date of a television show, user rating, summary of the show, and links to videos, photos and reviews, as well as information about the cast. Try a search for Dancing with the Stars.

Chris Lindsey recently built a great Infobar for Food Network results. It displays some essential info about recipes, like cook time and level of difficulty, and includes a deep link taking users directly to a printer-friendly page. Nice work, Chris!

We’re pleased with all of the new apps that have been developed and we’re looking forward to what new ideas and innovations the development community will come up with. If you have any ideas for apps that would improve the search experience or you’ve built something you want to let us know about, add a comment below.
The SearchMonkey Team

One of the most popular pieces of software on the web is WordPress, so we’re starting our test with a specific version (2.1.1) that is known to be vulnerable to exploits. If the test goes well, we may expand these messages to include other types of software on the web. The message that a webmaster will see in their Message Center if they run WordPress 2.1.1 will look like this:

Quick note from Matt: In general, it’s a good idea to make sure that your webserver’s software is up-to-date. For example, the current version of WordPress is 2.6.2; not only is that version more secure than previous versions, but it will also alert you when a new version of WordPress is available for downloading. If you run an older version of WordPress, I highly encourage you to upgrade to the latest version.

Written by Patrick Chapman, Search Quality Team and Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

Now, we show one set of statistics for Google and another set aggregating search partner performance. Search partners include AOL, Ask.com, and many other search sites around the web. You can view ad group or campaign performance at a summary level, or broken down by different combinations of Google, our search partners, and our content network. Additionally, separate Google and aggregate search partner statistics will soon be available in the Report Center.

(Click the image for a full-size version)

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Take a look for yourself.

Discoverability:

Accessibility - Crawling and Indexing:

Webmaster Central Overview:

Other Resources:

Google Presentations Version:
httpv://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc5x7mrn_245gf8kjwfx

Important links from this presentation as they chronologically appear in the video:
Add your URL to Google
Help Center: Sitemaps
Sitemaps.org
Robots.txt
Meta tags
Best uses of Flash
Best uses of Ajax
Duplicate content
Google’s Technology
Google’s History
PigeonRank
Help Center: Link Schemes
Help Center: Cloaking
Webmaster Guidelines
Webmaster Central
Google Analytics
Google Website Optimizer
Google Trends
Google Reader
Google Alerts
More Google Products

Special thanks to Wysz, Chark, and Alissa for the voices.

Written by Evan Tang, Search Quality

Hi all -

Later today Digg will be undergoing some significant updates, but upon first glance, it may seem that nothing has changed. That’s because the changes included in the coming release are 100% under the hood. For the last few months, Digg’s developers have been heads down scrubbing, cleaning, porting and improving the core code of Digg. Before I get into the details, I want to give a big thanks to everyone on Digg’s development team. They’ve done a great job with what, technically, is one of the largest pushes Digg’s released.

Digg’s development team has grown tremendously over the last few years to over twenty developers (we’re hiring!). At the same time, Digg’s code has been maturing from a monolithic ad-hoc approach to a set of consistent frameworks. Our goal was to standardize the way applications at Digg are written, managed, and deployed. Sounds fun, but how did we do it?

- During the profile redesign, we also rewrote our login and registration system using an internal event driven framework we call App. It’s a small, simple framework for quickly creating applications. App implements the ‘V’ and ‘C’ in ‘MVC’ along with input sanitization and authentication. Basically, it allows Digg developers to rapidly develop applications without worrying about the basics. As of this latest push we’ve ported the majority of Digg’s applications into App. Every developer at Digg has had a hand in porting thousands and thousands of lines of code to App.

- We also have another framework, called AJAX (I’m not very creative at naming my frameworks), that manages all of our AJAX endpoints (the PHP code that processes and responds to AJAX calls from jQuery). AJAX allows our developers to create a simple PHP class to process requests while the AJAX framework handles JSON and AHAH encoding, token checking, authentication, XSS/CSRF checks, input sanitization, HTTP error codes, exceptions, etc. Before this push about 70% of our endpoints were in the AJAX framework. As of this forthcoming push we’ve managed to port 100% of our endpoints to AJAX.

- One of the major problems at Digg, with regards to development processes, was that our code was monolithic. With three developers this isn’t a problem, but with 20+ it can get hairy. It can make merging difficult, interdependencies impossible, and make it impossible to promote/enforce ownership within SVN. In response to this, all of our core frameworks, applications, etc. are now PEAR packages. For those who don’t know, PEAR is a package management system for PHP, along with being a world class repository of PHP libraries. This allows us to break our code up into dozens of smaller projects which are owned by individuals and teams. PEAR also allows teams to define specific PEAR, PHP and PECL code that it depends on. What this means is that App_Login can enforce dependencies on App, Message, Mail, etc. and deployed separately from App_PermaLink or App_StoryList.

- Since our VP of Engineering John Quinn has joined the team, he’s been spoon feeding us the Agile pixie dust. Part of the Agile philosophy is unit testing, and the result is that all code at Digg must now have unit tests which are fed into our continuous integration environment. Our CI environment automagically checks out code every ten minutes, runs unit tests and verifies the code conforms to our coding standards, and then emails developers of any problems.

So, despite the appearance of nothing changing, big changes have been afoot in Digg’s development department. Tens of thousands of lines of code have been rewritten, massaged, ported, unit tested and modularized. But, why? So we can continue to develop quality new features at a quick pace even as we continue to grow our development team.

Thanks!

- Joe

Location, Location, Location
Now, you no longer are flying blind when you target your campaign by location in AdWords. Use the Map Overlay report and location data within Analytics to see, geographically, where your visitors are coming from – or where they aren’t coming from. You can then use this information to refine your AdWords marketing with location-targeted campaigns to build your business.

Note: You can also use the recently launched Geographic Performance report within AdWords to see similar information, but it currently does not have a visual component nor includes some of the metrics available in Analytics, such as time on site and bounce rate.


Improve Your Placement Targeting
The Google content network is the largest contextual advertising network in the world, comprised of high-quality websites, news pages, and blogs that partner with Google to display targeted AdWords ads. And within AdWords, you can hand-pick which sites you’d like your ads to run on by creating aplacement-targeted campaign. But how do you know which sites to pick? If you knew which sites were already sending you high value traffic, why not run your ads on these sites? This video will show you how to use Google Analytics to identify the best sites by using the Referring Sites report.

More to come!
There are a number of easy and effective ways to use Google Analytics with AdWords – whether you want to identify the best keywords, save money on bidding, expand your business or refine your campaigns – and we’ll post more of these videos soon!

Posted by Stephanie Hsu, Google Analytics Team

The Conversion Optimizer uses your conversion tracking data to get you more conversions at a lower cost. It achieves this by optimizing your placement in each ad auction to avoid unprofitable clicks and get you as many profitable clicks as possible.

You might already follow a similar strategy by bidding higher for keywords that convert more often and lower for keywords that convert less often. But the Conversion Optimizer can adjust your ad’s placement based on many other factors, including the keyword’s broad match query, the user’s location, and the conversion rates of Google’s search and content partner sites.

These extra adjustments enable many advertisers to achieve double-digit percentage increases in conversions, while paying the same price or less for each conversion.

Check out the AdWords Conversion Optimizer page to get started or to learn more about the Conversion Optimizer.
Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

What can I do?

We’ve included four new features in the API. You can see and update these settings for each site that you have verified. The features are:

• Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server’s capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.
• Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn’t reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide information to help us determine where your target users are located.
• Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.
• Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.

How do I do it?

We provide you with Java code samples for all the current Webmaster Tools API functionality. Here’s a sample snippet of code that takes a list of sites and updates the geographic location of all of them:
  // Authenticate against the Webmaster Tools service
  WebmasterToolsService service;
  try {
    service = new WebmasterToolsService(“exampleCo-exampleApp-1″);
    service.setUserCredentials(USERNAME, PASSWORD);
  } catch (AuthenticationException e) {
    System.out.println(“Error while authenticating.”);
    return;
  }

  // Read sites and geolocations from your database
  readSitesAndGeolocations(sitesList, geolocationsList);

  // Update all sites
  Iterator sites = sitesList.iterator();
  Iterator geolocations = geolocationsList.iterator();
  while (sites.hasNext() && geolocations.hasNext()) {
    // Create a blank entry and add the updated information
    SitesEntry updateEntry = new SitesEntry();
    updateEntry.setGeolocation(geolocations.next());

    // Get the URL to update the site
    String encodedSiteId = URLEncoder.encode(sites.next(),
        ”UTF-8″);
    URL siteUrl = new URL(
        “http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/feeds/sites/”
        + encodedSiteId);

    // Update the site
    service.update(siteUrl, updateEntry);
  }
Where do I get it?

The main page for the Webmaster Tools GData API explains all the details of the API. It has a detailed reference guide and also many code snippets that explain how to use the Java client library, which is available for download. You can find more details about GData and all the different Google APIs in the Google Data API homepage.
Written by Javier Tordable, Software Engineer

Folks who use m.twitter.com to access Twitter on a mobile browser have long lamented the lack of replies. Today we’re happy to say that @replies can be accessed via the mobile site. There’s a link at the bottom of your timeline and here’s a hint: you can just hit the number 1 on your keypad while browsing Twitter on your mobile and you’ll go directly to the page

It’s certainly not a new idea - after all, as consumers we’re exposed to many different media every day and, more pertinently, when making decisions on what to buy; so it makes sense that the best advertising campaigns are those that present us with a relevant message at each stage of that decision-making process.

This doesn’t necessarily mean spending more on each campaign, but rather thinking carefully about which online elements - search, display, social media etc - to include.

What is relatively new is being able to prove the value of combining search and display in an online campaign, particularly in Europe (much of the existing research covering this area has been conducted in the US).

Here at Microsoft we’ve conducted 3 case studies in particular around campaigns in Europe, and the results are compelling. The campaigns are from the UK and France, one each from the finance, travel and technology sectors.

While the exact numbers differ between the campaigns, the results consistently show that the effect of the display advertising is magnified by supporting it with a complementary search campaign; likewise, the impact of the search advertising is greatly increased when consumers are ‘primed’ with a well-planned display schedule.

This increased impact is visible through the key measures of response (how many people visited the advertiser’s website), engagement (page views and time spent on-site), and perhaps most importantly, conversions.

In fact, the combination of search and display in an online schedule was up to 15 times more effective than the display or search elements in isolation.

Our most recent case study takes this analysis a step further, and shows that after seeing the display advertising, consumers are 50% more likely to search on a brand’s key branded keywords (those based on the brand name and any messages used in the display formats).

And, of course, once they’re searching on your brand’s keywords, consumers are one step closer to clicking through to your website..

n short, to get the most out of your search campaign, you should consider running a complementary display campaign to drive consumers to your search keywords. And every display campaign should have a well-executed search element to convert consumers’ interest to action!

If you would like more information about the research, the UK case studies are explained in more detail on the Microsoft Advertising site: click here for the travel study and here for the finance study.

The French case study is so new we haven’t been able to post it yet, but will be on the Microsoft Advertising site shortly!

If you have any questions or comments please visit the adCenter Forum.

by Nick Drew - MSFT

Sometimes a product launch is big, like our recent launch of APT from Yahoo!. And sometimes it’s understated, like the improved version of our contextual advertising product, Content Match, which we’re announcing this week. It’s not a new brand, and it looks virtually the same in the user interface. It just works better—at matching your ads with interested customers and helping you achieve better return on your ad dollars.

Better Matching for Higher Click-Through Rates
We’ve been gradually moving Content Match to a new matching technology over the past few months. The new technology not only attempts to understand what the content is on a page, but also, who is viewing it, which helps you get your ad in front of the right customer. Content Match now combines a better understanding of web page and ad content with insights from users’ geographic and behavioral profiles.

This combination can lead to more relevant clicks. Since we started rolling out the new technology, we’ve generally seen increases in Content Match click-through rates—and some advertisers have seen those rates climb appreciably. What it does for you can depend on a lot of things, including the keywords you select, the ads you write, and the settings you choose.

Improved? Ask these Advertisers
Results matter for Bankrate.com, which provides financial services to consumers. A long-time customer of Yahoo! Search Marketing, Bankrate takes a very performance-driven approach to search engine marketing. The company tested Yahoo!’s improved Content Match services this past August and September, and experienced significantly increased conversions during that period. “Yahoo!’s Content Match Network refocus on quality and relevancy has improved the delivery of the right message to the right person at the right time,” says Rafael Zorrilla, Bankrate.com’s Director of Interactive Marketing.

Lulu.com, a marketplace for digital content from authors, artists and musicians, has used Yahoo! Search Marketing for more than four years to point users to its services, which include free web storefronts and social networking offerings. Lulu’s Director of Search Engine Marketing, Dan London, has used Content Match on and off for the past two years. Recently, he noticed significant improvements to the service, including appreciably lower costs of conversion.

“In the last couple of months, I noticed that targeting our users through contextual ads was improving and that we were seeing more clicks at lower costs,” he says. “Although we had spent time improving the keywords in our campaigns, we knew that there had to be something more to it. After learning that Yahoo! had made improvements to its matching technology, it’s clear that it’s been part of what has driven this overall effectiveness.”

Why Content Match?
Content Match can help you reach a wider range of traffic than you could previously reach with search alone, and can help raise your brand awareness. You can:

• Tap into the customers who visit Yahoo! and its content network for activities beside search, such as email or news.
• Gain impressions at a relatively low cost and grow your brand.
• Complement your offline and search campaigns.

Content Match has been a great service for Lulu, according to London. “Yahoo!’s Content Match has allowed us the opportunity to reach potential customers who do not turn to search engines to find what they need,” he says.

What Do I Need to Do?
The new matching technology is already running, so all you need to do is start a Content Match campaign. Because Content Match isn’t necessarily meant to target users when they are actively searching for your business, it may convert at a different rate than Sponsored Search. Keep in mind these basic guidelines when you set up your campaign:

• Create Content Match-only campaigns to manage bids and budgets separately from Sponsored Search.
• See how much you can afford, and adjust your bids as you learn the value of this traffic for you. If you add a Content Match campaign, you may need to adjust your budget accordingly.
• Write specific ads and select targeted keywords for those ads, so that the ads are more likely to appear in the type of content where you want them.

If you’ve been using Content Match, you may already be noticing a bump. If you’re not using it yet and it fits your business, it may be worth a try.

— Jeff Sweat

Vint Cerf has some predictions about the interplanetary Internet, while Kai-Fu Lee talks about the growing ubiquity of cloud computing. Also featured are stories from early Googlers, likeCraig Silverstein’s memories of a certain famous garage, and Marissa Mayer’s reflections on the spirit that has carried over from our formative years.

So take a few minutes to watch this blended tale of startup quirkiness and big dreams. And if you like, feel free to comment on YouTube.

Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog Team

Starting today, if you search for [gas prices + city name/zip code] or [cheap gas + city name/zip code], you’ll get a shortcut that gives you comprehensive information such as gas prices, locations and even maps without having to leave the search results page. And, if you don’t happen to include a city name or zip code, don’t fret. We’ll do our best to determine the stations closest to you.

Gas prices can vary drastically in any given city - take Chicago for example, with a low of $3.54 and a high of $4.33 per gallon - so, do a quick search before you head out on the road.

Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

Recently I’ve been speaking at several design conferences about the necessity for iterative development. One of the key points I’ve been making is that subtraction is an oft-overlooked type of improvement. The retirement of these two features on the Digg site is an example of this principle in practice.

DIGG PODCASTS

The podcasts section experiment started almost two years ago. At the time, podcasts were relatively new and we saw them as a unique medium – different enough from audio or video to warrant a separate and custom-designed section of the site. That section was developed to differentiate between each ‘episode’ and the parent ‘show’, which could be ranked over a long period of time. Unfortunately, as we all learned, the podcasts section stagnated because the top shows dominated and there was little activity. This shortcoming is one reason that the podcasts section is used by less than a thousand people on a regular basis.

Over the past couple of years, we also saw a rise in the submission of episodic videos in the main sections of Digg under the ‘video’ media type. Television shows, individual podcast episodes, and clips from shows were frequently intermixed in the main Digg river. This type of natural activity, which can compared to the idea of desire paths, is a pretty strong indication that ‘videos’ is a better home for podcast-type material. By eliminating the awkward differentiation of podcasts, we’ll be greatly simplifying Digg from a user standpoint.

DIGG SPY

The original Digg Spy is being retired for different reasons. We built Digg Spy in the very early days of Digg, when the activity level was less frenetic than it is today and we could show a lot of the action through a live activity stream. It was great. You could discover new content and new people in a visual way that AJAX was just then letting us do.

As Digg grew, Digg Spy became less and less representative of the breadth of activity on the site. We began showing ever-smaller percentages of the activity on the site in order to keep the stream from becoming a blur. Thus, Digg Spy became less informative. When we added the Big Spy feature to the Digg Labs, a better and more entertaining version, the value and distinction of the original Spy became even less clear. We therefore elected to remove it as a feature that’s outlived its purpose. Digg Spy is dead, long live Big Spy.

One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won’t be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very small subset of buries on the site actually appeared on Digg Spy due to the small window of activity that was actually visible through the feature and any ‘patterns’ that people perceived by watching the buries have always been grossly inaccurate.

SUMMING UP

Occasionally pruning is the prudent thing to do – in these two cases, I’m confident that it’s the right course of action for the longer term vision of Digg. Thanks so much if you’re one of the people who regularly visited the podcasts section or if you enjoyed watching the Digg Spy stream past – we really appreciate your participation.

Cheers, Daniel

You should know this from your own Web usage, but a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project says that the most popular Web activity for Americans is email, followed closely by searching. The two lessons you should take from these findings are:

1. It makes sense to do email marketing, and
2. It makes sense to do search marketing.

After all, both online channels are perfect ways to meet customers in their natural online habitats.

But there’s a way to make your search and your email work even better. How? Use them together. Here are three suggestions as to how to do it.

1. Use Search to Make Your Email Smarter
To get a strong response to your email blasts, you need to use just the right words and just the right message. This will make your customers want to read your email and respond to it. A good place to start looking for the right kind of language is in your Sponsored Search campaigns:

• Use your best-performing search keywords within your email subject line and body copy.
• Use your best-performing search creatives as the core of your email subject lines.
• Use your best-converting search landing pages as the model for your email body and your email landing pages.

Think about it: If certain words, messages and concepts drive searchers to convert via search, then those same words, messages and concepts should resonate with similarly minded shoppers within email. So it follows that if you want to learn how to sell to your email customers, you should ask your search customers.

2. Use Email to Make Your Search Work Better
People who have signed up to your email lists are, without a doubt, great examples of who your target customers are. After all, they’ve explicitly asked you to keep in touch with them. So if you understand your email subscribers’ online behaviors, you can read the mind of your target market.

Think about the types of wording, messages, email body and landing pages those target customers respond to best, and you can get clues as to what types of keywords, ad copy and landing pages will best capture the attention (and conversions) of people like them as they use search.

And, of course, look at the keywords, ad copy and landing pages that drove those email sign-ups to begin with: They’ve clearly worked!

3. Bringing it Together
For this last point, allow me to provide a simple example:

Consider a shopper who’s bought a specific brand of pants (let’s say, Acme Pants). She’s very happy with that brand, and the next time she wants to buy a new pair of pants, she searches for “Acme Pants,” clicks on a Sponsored Search ad, and buys the item.

That’s a Sponsored Search click that’s led to a sale—and so, arguably, that’s search spend well spent.

But here’s an even better scenario: The same shopper signs up to an Acme Pants email list. The next time she needs a pair of pants, she doesn’t search at all—and so she doesn’t create any search click costs for Acme. Instead, she arrives at the Acme Pants site via the Acme email, and buys a new pair of pants directly from the manufacturer.

The moral of this tale? Use Sponsored Search to acquire new customers. Then once you have those customers in your database, help them bypass the search engines by putting them on your email lists. Offer a clear “email signup” link throughout your site, and suggest that shoppers sign up to your email list as part of the checkout process.

You can invest the money you’ll save into getting even more customers via Sponsored Search.

Looking for more ideas on combining email with search? I’d suggest searching for them—and then emailing a friend about what you find.

— Abe Mezrich, Communications Manager, Didit

Here’s an example tip you’ll find: specifically mentioning any special holiday promotions you are running in your ad text drives additional interest from consumers. Clear and compelling ads with season-specific text is a good way to generate more clicks.

As for tools, Google has several offerings that retailers can use to help drive additional traffic and sales this holiday season such as Google Product Search, which allows shoppers to search for and find things they want to buy online. You can use Product Search to promote your goods and drive holiday traffic to your store for free.

With the holidays just around the corner, now is a good time to make sure that your site is in the best shape for maximizing your traffic and revenue. Please visit the Holiday tips page for more information, and remember - it’s never too early to start preparing for the season.

Update: Corrected tips page link. As a reminder, Google Checkout is currently available only to merchants in the US and UK, and Google Product Search is currently available only to merchants in the US, UK, and Germany.

Posted by Christian Yee, Inside AdWords crew

There’s a simple solution: turn to Google Maps to find local information. We’ve gathered a lot of useful info about local businesses so you can find everything you need in one place. You can find neighborhoods and see if they’re close to downtown, parks or other places of interest. If you’re moving into a new home, you can look for nearby supermarkets, hardware stores, restaurants and other places that will help you settle in. Almost every business listing includes the phone number, website, store hours, price and more. Most also have user reviews and photos.

And it turns out I wasn’t the only one who turned to Google Maps to learn more about my town. Watch this video to see how Google Maps helped Ryan, a fellow newcomer to the Bay Area

Even if you know your hometown like the back of your hand, odds are you’ll want to go somewhere new at some point. Not only can you find out the address of a specific location and get directions to it before even heading out the door, but you can virtually explore the neighborhood with Street View (available in many cities in the U.S., Japan, and Australia), or check out live traffic conditions. You can also use the “Send” feature of Google Maps to text the address to your phone or email directions to friends.

Watch this video to see all the things you can do:

And don’t forget, with Google Maps for mobile, you can access all of this great information on the go.

Posted by Cathy Tang, Google Maps and Earth

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

When we designed Google Maps for the T-Mobile G1, we set out to create a great mapping application that took full advantage of the G1’s hardware, like the touch screen, accelerometer, and GPS, as well as the deep system integration made possible by the Android platform.

One of my favorite things to do with Google Maps on Android is to explore new and favorite places. You can pan around and zoom in and out easily using just your thumb on the touchscreen – a big plus for all those times when that other hand is unavailable. And if I want to see a restaurant or building up close, I can switch to Street View and view a panorama from street level. I can even turn on Compass mode to let me look around the panorama by moving my phone up, down, and to the side. It’s like popping up a virtual periscope anywhere you want to check out what’s there with your own eyes. Check out the video below for a quick demo. Note that Street View on Android is only available in the US at this time.

When I’m in a new city or just a new part of town, I like to turn on My Location. It can use GPS or just the nearest cell tower to tell me where I am and re-center my position in the middle of my screen when I approach the edge. When I’m walking or in a taxi in a dense city, like New York, I zoom in to street level and turn on GPS for the highest accuracy.

And as I wander the city, I can search for nearby businesses (like restaurants), and use Android’s integrated Map features to save search results to my contacts. For instance, if I find a restaurant that I like, I can save it to my contacts and then later on call it or Map it with one touch. In the future, when I do another search with Maps, I might even see this contact again as a suggested search result along side past queries.

Maps is also integrated with email, IM, and the web on Android. For instance, street addresses that appear as plain text in these apps become touchable zones that you can click on to take you straight to Maps. Something similar happens when a Google Maps link is pasted into an email, IM or placed on a web page. When I touch it, I can choose whether to view the map in the browser, in Google Maps, or in any other application that’s built to handle what’s known to Android developers as an “intent.” Or, I can make the choice once and save it as my default map-viewing application (Google Maps, in my case).

Perhaps best of all is that most of the resources, flexibility, and functionality in Google Maps are available to any application written for Android. Cab4me and Locale are both Android Developer Challenge winners that used the Android platform to build compelling applications with maps and location at their core. Any developer can use Android’s MapView and location APIs to build location-aware mobile applications like these. While the team is proud of Google Maps on Android and other cool applications we’ve seen to date, we’re equally excited to see what new kinds of maps and location-enabled applications developers create in the coming months.

Posted by David Conway, Product Manager, Android Team

Today, we’re taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding “click-to-buy” links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos. Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs, books, and movies — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts. 

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable eCommerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site. 

These retail links are being gradually added to our library of music videos and are currently only available to users in the United States, but our goal is to slowly but surely expand the program to additional content and product partners, as well as our international users. We’ll be experimenting with the UI over time to make sure this works for our community, and we’ll continue to innovate based on your feedback. We’re just getting started, so stay tuned for other innovative new features and product options soon. 

Have fun,
The YouTube Team

Here’s a quick video to give you a better idea of what games are part of our network and how advertisers can use this medium to reach their target audience:

And here’s another, less flashy video, to show actual game play and how an ad could appear within the game:

We’ve built ad technology for games played within a user’s browser, and now we’re looking to expand our publisher network. At this time, eligible publishers must have a minimum of 500,000 game plays per day and have 80% of their traffic from the U.S. or the U.K. If you’re interested in becoming a AdSense for games beta publisher, feel free to review our complete list of requirements and submit an application. You can also find more information on our games site.

Updated post with game play requirements

Posted by Ryan Hayward - Ads Product Marketing

After months of hard work, late nights and truckloads of energy drinks, we launched the new Ask.com today and we’re really excited about it. This launch continues our leadership in search innovation by delivering on our users’ core needs of relevance, streamlined user experience, and fast page loads.

Our goal is to deliver the best answer to you, the first time, every time. We know that is a difficult goal and no search engine can always deliver with that precision 100% of the time, but we think we’re getting closer and closer to the ‘bullseye’. We also believe you will agree once you’ve tried out our new version.

Presenting direct answers to your searches, front and center, has always been at the heart of the Ask.com experience, and we push further down that path today with the introduction of three new answer technologies:  DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm. These technologies take both structured and unstructured data, and - instead of delivering a title and description for each document - they deliver answers.  Here’s an example.

Let’s say you just got a new pet snake and you were wondering how often it will shed its skin.  Here is how other search engines would present a result to your search “how often do snakes shed their skin?”:

Not too informative — and how can you be sure the page really answers your question? Well, here is how the new Ask.com will present this result to you:

There you go — your answer, front and center.

We have answers for all kinds of searches. Want to know what a good credit score is?  Try it out: What is a good credit score?

Or maybe you need to learn a new bike trick: How do you do a wheelie?

Or you need to find out what it will cost you to send all those Miley Cyrus fan letters you’ve written: Postage stamp price

I could go on and on, but instead of reading more - how about just giving the new Ask a test drive? We’ll post more about all the new and exciting additions to Ask.com over the next week.

Thanks for giving us a try.

Analytics Seminars for Success are brought to you by Google authorized Seminar Leaders. These guys eat, live & breath Google Analytics! Hundreds of satisfied people have attended so far. You can attend the Intro day or theAdvanced day… or both!

Course materials will be provided to all that attend and you even get a $50 AdWords credit for each session.

So, if you want to improve how you are using Google Analytics, come to one of the upcoming trainings:

• New York City - Oct 9, 10 - Register
• Phoenix, Arizona - Oct 13, 14 - Register
• Columbus, Ohio - Oct 22, 23 - Register
• Los Angeles, CA - Nov 5, 6 - Register
• Seattle, WA - Dec 8, 9 - Register
• Las Vegas, NV - Jan 21, 22 - Register
• San Jose, CA - Feb 9, 10 - Register

Learn more about the topics covered and a full calendar of our sessions at the Analytics and AdWords Seminars for Success page.

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

Creating ad placements allows them to show up in AdWords, so that advertisers who create placement-targeted campaigns can include your content directly. What many publishers don’t know is that this also makes your content available to Google’s internal sales teams, who work closely with many advertisers looking to target a certain audience or type of content. With this in mind, we thought it would be important to mention a few best practices which will help advertisers and our internal sales teams target your content to help you maximize revenue:

First, take time to make sure your channel names and descriptions accurately describe your content and audience. By including descriptions that closely reflect your content, you’ll also attract advertisers from those areas. Naming and descriptions are important.

On that note, our second tip: be very careful about changing the name of an ad placement. If an advertiser has already targeted one of your specific channels, the channel will become unavailable to the advertiser once you change its name. If you wish to rename a channel, we recommend creating a second channel with the new name, and then attaching both channels to your ad unit. Remember, you can attach up to five custom channels to an ad unit.

Third, use the 300×250 medium rectangle, opted in to both text and image ads. This is one type of targetable ad unit that’s in high demand by Google’s CPM advertisers. We recommend placing these units in line with your content, and describing them as they relate to the content. This combination of format and placement enables advertisers to use image, text, or rich media (including gadget ads) effectively. In feeds, we recommend opting in to both image and text in all ad units, as many of these advertisers only target with image ads into feeds.

Finally, as always, the most important tip for maximizing revenue from your ad placements is to create quality content that is visually appealing and attracts a quality audience. Many brand advertisers look at all placements before placing an advertising order to make sure the destination sites are in line with their brand and attract the type of audience they wish to target for a particular campaign.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - AdSense Product Manager

Today, we’re pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we’re now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you’ll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

In this example, the green “64 blogs” link takes you inside the cluster and shows you all the blog posts for a story.

We’ve had a great time building the new homepage and we hope you enjoy using it. Please give it a try and let us know if you have comments or suggestions. We’re launching in English only today, but plan to add new features and support for more languages in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Posted by Michael Cohen, Product Manager

• Apple has captured the top trend today as people react to the company’s bold threat to close the world’s biggest music store if American music publishers raise royalties 66%.
• NDA and iPhone are also trending because Apple has announced it will no longer require app developers to keep their projects under wraps.
• Halloween is trending this morning as lots of folks note that October has arrived and Twitter excitedly—about a month, of all things.
• Phish has reunited and it’s generating a mix of twitter updates ranging from “who cares” to “break out the hacky sack.”
• #mimasum08 is happening right now and people are twittering about Ze Frank’s presentation at the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association Summit.
• FOWA Miami has made it to the trends even though the event hasn’t even happened yet—folks are just excited about going.

Sarah Palin, Senate, and #bailout continue to trend.

It’s a pretty good guess you’ve heard opinions on the Yahoo!-Google marketing agreement from just about everybody: your coworkers, your competitors, your daily blog, and — who knows? — maybe even your taxi driver. Which is why we thought we could help you sift through the clutter to the facts.

This week we launched the Yahoo! Search Agreement site, which will help you find out what you need to know about the commercial arrangement announced by Yahoo! and Google in June. We hope the information archived on this site will help visitors understand why the agreement with Google will make Yahoo! a stronger competitor in online advertising and will benefit advertisers, publishers and end users.

Among the items you’ll find there is a blog post from our President, Sue Decker, that busts some myths about the agreement. For example, Sue writes,

[The agreement is] simply a contract that gives Yahoo! the right, but no obligation, to show Google AdSense ads on Yahoo!’s own network. It’s important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to “backfill” with Google ads if and when we see fit.

You can also view more details of the deal on the site, as well as frequently asked questions and press coverage. With the facts in hand — unfiltered by your workout buddies — we hope you’ll discover how the arrangement might benefit you.

– The Team

We’re also hoping people will tell their friends and family about Search for a Cause. You can tell them to search for terms like “breast cancer,” “Susan G. Komen” or “pink ribbon” at Yahoo!. Come tomorrow, they’ll see a pinkified results page and a pink ribbon to click on and add the app.

Working with a number of teams here at Yahoo!, including SearchMonkey, Yahoo! for Good, Yahoo! Health, andfront page, it’s been a group effort to build awareness around breast cancer and we’re happy to be a part of it. A special thanks goes out to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
Graham Mudd & Hilda Chan
Yahoo! Search

We had so much fun searching that we wanted to put this old index online for everyone to play with. We thought it’d be even cooler if we could actually see the full versions of the old web pages, so we worked with the Internet Archive to link to their cache of these pages from 2001. Step into the time machine and try a 2001 Google search.

For more information on this search, please read our FAQ.

Posted by Shirin Oskooi, Product Manager

• Rosh Hashanah is trending on Twitter as folks reflect back on the year in 140 characters or less—shofar sho good?
• Iron Man was released today on DVD and Blu Ray and Twitter is teeming with plans to watch it at home tonight.
• #atlgas is still trending as people in Atlanta work together on Twitter to find gas during the shortage affecting the area.

Obama, Sarah Palin, Bailout, Congress, and Wall Street remain top of mind as Twitter-ers share opinions and ideas about this election and the crazy roller coaster ride that is our economy.

Infrastructure
The most important news is that our new platform has been stable and is meeting our performance goals. In the days of the old Delicious, we had to put a lot of effort into just keeping the lights on and struggling to keep up with growth. With our new infrastructure, these problems are largely gone and our pagers have never been so quiet. But more importantly the Delicious service is now faster and more reliable, which was a key goal of this project. In fact, I’m very happy to say that Delicious has experienced zero downtime since the day after launch. (Hopefully now that I’ve said that we won’t discover an unshielded thermal exhaust port somewhere…)

Some of you have reported seeing error messages indicating you’ve been “blocked” from accessing Delicious or that the service is unavailable. This is not due to Delicious being down (it isn’t); rather it appears the primary cause is a bug in older versions of our Delicious Bookmarks add-on for Firefox. If you use our Firefox add-on please make sure you have the very latest version from here. You can also make sure you’re up-to-date by clicking “Find Updates” under “Tools” → “Add-ons” in Firefox.

Browser add-ons
Speaking of add-ons, we recently launched our Internet Explorer add-on. It includes most of the features offered by our popular Firefox version and works with IE 6 and 7 (IE 8 beta 2 generally works as well, although it won’t be official until IE 8 is). The response has been great so far; thanks to all of you who have tried it out. Your comments on the forum have helped us track down a number of bugs that we addressed in a major update last week. There were also some issues with our Firefox add-on immediately following the launch of the new Delicious, and we recently released an update for that as well. So please make sure you’re running our latest versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Design
We had two major goals for the new design. The first was to address the user feedback we’ve received over the last few years regarding usability problems, consistency issues, and interface bugs. Our second goal was to make Delicious even easier to understand and thus to bring new users into the community. So far it seems to be working on both counts. The majority of the feedback has been positive (thanks!), and we’re also seeing a notable increase in new users and general traffic across Delicious.

That said, we know that not all of you are fans of the new design. There has been plenty of vocal and well-reasoned feedback on the discussion forum, and we’ve been reading every post and email and responding as much as possible. We’ve also been taking action. Since the initial launch we’ve made more than 30 changes to the new interface, nearly all of them in direct response to user feedback. We’ve also fixed a number of bugs you pointed out. You can read more about these changes here.

Moving forward we will continue listening to and taking action based on your comments, questions, bug reports, and suggestions. We want to ensure that Delicious remains the greatest social bookmarking tool, both for new users and for the people who already know and love it. We’re also working on new functionality that you’ve been asking for, and we look forward to sharing more about that soon.

If you haven’t already, please join the conversation on our forum and let us know what you think. Thanks for using Delicious!

Sheila Parker
Product Manager

So whether you’re a plumber, a map data provider, a local government, a major media company or a museum, we have a wealth of information available to help you reach your audience through Google. Comments are open on the blog — we look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Patrick Jabal, Director, Content Partnerships