The new version of Google Analytics is currently in beta, where Ecreative Internet Marketing has been playing with it for some time now. Google just announced a new feature for the new analytics: site speed reports. Learn how quickly your site is loading, and compare load times across different pages, and for users with different browsers and geographical regions.
Google has just implemented the requirement for unique product identifiers for products in the Google shopping feed. Based on Google’s comments, it appears that the main focus of this requirement is to make it easier for Google to know when two offerings are actually the same product, and then to display the lowest price. Unfortunately, this sounds like not just an easy system to game, but possibly one that encourages deceptive e-retailing practices.
Google has offered adwords advertisers the ability to use a unique Google-provided phone number in their ads that re-route to their phone line. The advantage of using the Google number is that all calls to that number could be automatically tracked via call metrics, giving a far better view of how the adwords campaign was performing. But starting in May, Google will be charging $1.00 for manually dialed calls to that number.
Ecreative Internet Marketing has released version 0.8 of the free Wordpress plugin: Trackable Social Share Icons. This update brings added functionality and yet more customization options to the already popular social share plugin.
Optify has released new research of over a million click-throughs in an attempt to predict what percentage of people click on the first result of Google, vs the second, third, etc. We’ve seen research like this before dating back to 2006, but this is certainly the most recent research, and with the changing face of Google results — with social, images, and media as well as geo-targeted search — it’s always good to see recent research. Interestingly, the Optify study shows the lowest click through percentage for the number one Google position of any study to date.
