by Jason Green on September 17, 2010 · 1 comment
This week, Google held their annual summit for Google Analytics Certified Partners (GACP: Previously Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC))
I first attended the GAAC/GACP summit in 2007 as an employee of Lunametrics, and to this day, I consider it one of the best summits I’ve ever attended. On top of all of the sights, such as the free gourmet lunches, arcades, massage chairs, etc…, it was a great opportunity to meet other Google Analytics professionals. Their presentations were very insightful and immediately useful. I even had the honor of talking with the Google Analytics Evangelist, and analytics rockstar, Avinash Kaushik.
The GACP Summit is held every year, usually in September, and you can be sure there will be some great announcements coming from the attendees in the coming months.
If you work for a Google Analytics Certified Partner, you need to beg for them to send you to this summit next year. It is the most useful summit you’ll attend and is worth every penny.
btw…the picture of me on the right is from the GooglePlex in Mountanview, CA. I would have more pics, but I almost got tackled every time I tried to take a picture. Security is pretty tight. 
While Google Analytics is by far the best analytics package I’ve ever used, I’m disappointed to see that neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! have been able to stick it out in the web analytics arena. Microsoft Gatineau (Probably better known as Microsoft AdCenter Analytics) was an interesting but short-lived attempt at web analytics with demographics. We have the same issue with Yahoo Web Analytics. It was just too short-lived to evolve into something as great as Google Analytics. With the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal in place, I think there’s an opportunity for synergy in web analytics.
Dear Microsoft and Yahoo!,
The web is better with competition, so please get back into the web analytics game. Together, you have the opportunity to compete head-to-head with Google Analytics. The key caveat is that you need to stick it out for at least 5 years. Even Google Analytics was clunky and crash-prone in the first year. Your last attempts at web analytics were honorable and if given time, they might have succeeded. Do it for the web analytics community.
Thank you,
Jason Green
BusinessHut.com
Google just released the Gmail Priority Inbox and I already think it’s a fantastic improvement to email as we know it.
Gmail has always had the “star” feature to flag important emails, but if you’re anything like me, those emails just move down the list with all the rest, never to be seen again.
The great thing about Gmail Priority Inbox is that it puts those important emails right at the top of the list. To remove them, you have to actively remove the star or mark them as unimportant. This is a great way to increase your productivity. It is very similar to the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology which says you should either work the email, defer it for later followup, defer it to someone else, or archive/delete it.
The magic of the Gmail Priority Inbox is that it learns from your usage of Gmail. It remembers which emails you read and automatically marks them as more important than the ones you don’t. This allows you to follow up with those important emails first, and naturally makes the less important emails fall lower on the page.
This is just one of the reasons we recommend Google Apps to all of our small business customers. There is no other email service with these kind of features. Plus, the Gmail spam filter is absolutely unmatched by anything else in the world. We’d be happy to help you set up Google Apps for your small business. Just contact us with the form on the right. Or, if you’re more tech-savvy, feel free to check out Google Apps for yourself.
Either way, the Gmail Priority Inbox video is very entertaining. You can view that here: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html
The Google Apps homepage can be found here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html
I love Google! They provide incredible services to the online community for free! Plus, they’re giving away Gmail stickers now too!
However, I agree with Brian Clark at CopyBlogger in that we shouldn’t use so much energy to game the system. We need to concentrate on excellent content that is useful to many people. Writing a bunch of blog posts only to fill your site with keywords might get you some random search traffic, but it’s not even close to having loyal subscribers.
Simple comparison:
1. You get 1000 visitors in a month thanks to the 200 posts you wrote that were strategically written to include buzzwords from the long tail and the short head.
- Super~ These people will give you about 10 seconds of their time before they see what you’ve done. Real people can easily recognize a post that’s stuffed with keywords or that was purely written to attract the search engines. You got a visitor, but they’ll never be back.
2. You have 100 subscribers that read every one of your posts. They visit your site and occasionally leave comments. Maybe a few of them have blogs of their own and like to comment about your posts from there. Yes, that’s an inbound link that will help your search rank. You didn’t get it by spamming the Internet with garbage. You got it by writing content that someone found useful. They found it so useful that they took time out of their day to write about it and give you a link. Now the readers of that blog, who trust what the writer has to say, click over to your blog. Snap! More subscribers. And the cycle continues.
A little more math to back up #2: If you write 10 high-quality posts per month and all 100 subscribers visit, that’s 1000 visits right there. Add in the link juice and the fact that it will naturally contain good keywords, and you can expect a ton more traffic than #1.
Moral of the Story:
Everyone please stop writing posts solely for the search engines! Yes, I’m guilty too, but I’m starting to come around. When writing a post pretend that you’re writing a letter to a friend. If you wouldn’t send this to a friend, then why would anyone else care to read it? If you don’t pass that qualifier, don’t write the post.