GAIC certificate previews

Dear reader,

Google has made it possible to share your Google Analytics or AdWords test results. You can decide what information to share and what tests to share, and will be given a link to the results. Here’s a link to my GAIC test that I blogged about earlier.

To create yours, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Google Testing Center and sign in to your account.
2. Click the Manage Your Test Records link.
3. Click the Add link.
4. On the next screen, select the information that you want included in the test record. The Description can be any name you want; you’ll be the only one who sees this name.
5. Click Save. You’ll now see a test record.
6. Click the Description name to get the link. You can share your test record by copying and pasting the link.(Taken from the GA team’s marketing e-mail about sharing test results)

MySpace Analytics for artists

Dear reader,

Logging to my MySpace account tonight, I was delighted to see that MySpace has a new analytics dashboard for artists! Although it only shows little information for now such as song plays and friends’ demographics, it is definitely a move towards the right direction. I’m also delighted to see that different social media platforms are more and more beginning to collaborate – they know they have to. I enjoy being able to feed my Reverbnation.com status to my Twitter, MySpace and Facebook profiles as this simply saves time.

Nonetheless, Social Media Analytics is still a mere infant and has a hard n’ long way to go. There are various SMA tools on the market but none of them handles communities that are shrouded behind passwords. None of these tools can read Facebook walls, to put it another way around.

Google Analytics new features 10/2009

Dear reader,

More echo for the announcement of the new GA features on 20th October 2009? No. Although, I too, see these as absolutely brilliant and necessary improvements, today I’m writing out of discontent. This is because I’m seeing everyone else cheer the excellency of the new improvements, and I cannot access them on any of my Google Analytics profiles or accounts. This sucks.

On another blog I then found out that the features are not rolled out on every account at the same time, but in steps. Google, I’m asking you to please include a golive roadmap in the future for similar release announcements! Or at least clearly state that you’re not giving out the features to everyone just yet.

Other than that, I praise the Google Analytics team for the short update release intervals. If we’re seeing a new update with feature improvements come out every half year in the future, Google will evidently make it even more difficult to move from GA to other more robust but seriously more costly solutions and will be catching up on them anyway.

Two acquisitions

Dear reader,

Yesterday and today two rather interesting company acquisitions took place in the internet field. First, yesterday Adobe announced having bought one of the leading web analytics software vendors, Omniture, and today Google announced to have obtained reCaptcha. Omniture’s acquisition by Adobe has shaken the web analytics world quite a bit, at least judging from the numerous tweets and blog echoes around the web. Here’s some thoughts on the acquisition bya former Omniture employee, Adam Greco.

New Google AdPlanner GUI

Dear reader,

This morning I was delighted as I was greeted with an e-mail from Google stating they had just renewed the Google AdPlanner interface.

Google AdPlanner is a service with which one can define the most suitable websites for advertising to desired target group. You can also build media plans with the websites that best respond to your target group demographics.

If you’re a site owner, you can add information on how to advertise on your site and with which formats, to ensure potential advertisers will find the relevant information from the tool they’re using to build their media plans. You can also share Google Analytics data to let those potential advertisers know what your site would be worth for them.

The new GUI is a lot easier to use, resembles AdWords a lot and is far less buggy than the previous one. Now go try it and dazzle your Marketing Managers with data!

Passed Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test

Dear Reader,

Google Analytics IQ test

I’m congratulating myself for having just passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification test. I thought the test was almost easy in the end although my score was (only?) 86% right (75% correct answers needed to pass). Most of the questions were not very hard and even though there were 70 questions in all, I had answered them in approximately 30 minutes not counting a couple of marked questions that I reviewed after completing the rest. The test has a 90 minute time limit.

The video tutorials on the Conversion University Help page were really helpful and most questions were actually almost directly taken from the video material. The test has been available from the beginning of March 2009 and I’m now the 819th to be certified.

Just another search engine?

Dear reader,

Oparla

Another search engine has popped into existence. Oparla is about to launch on 14th of April. Oparla is supposed to have a unique social search software. Although I don’t think it is entirely unique after what Google has been doing previously, what IS unique is that Oparla will have a daily prize draw for registered users, giving out up to £1.000 for simply doing a search.

Oparla’s GUI is also unique – it shows search results in a table by default. While a table doesn’t allow for much text for descriptions, etc, it certainly saves vertical space and allows for more search results to be displayed on each page. Fortunately, Oparla also offers a ‘classic view’ for those who do not wish to learn how to cope with the ‘list view’ tables.

Microsoft’s analytics solution to close

Dear reader,

On March 12th the Microsoft AdCenter Analytics team announced that the beta testing phase of the product will end and the development program will close. This is unfortunate to hear as I was really looking forward to Microsoft’s response to Google Analytics and the (hopefully) upcoming Yahoo! Web Analytics (former IndexTools).

Kumo vs. Google

Dear reader,

Quick note: This week Cnet published a screenshot along with an internal memo on Kumo, Microsoft’s upcoming new search engine. The new search engine is also going on Microsoft’s internal testing phase this week. Although I doubt Kumo will eat Google’s market share anytime soon, it will be interesting to see what Microsoft has to offer that Google doesn’t or if it will just be a rebranded Live search.

BR,
Webgrizzly

Watch out for the Twitter strategist spammer

Dear Reader,

I just recently got hit by a Twitter spoofer using the name (albeit twisted) of Jeremiah Owyang. Judging from the comments mr. Owyang has received on his blog, there are variants asking for money and/or credit card numbers out there so watch out.

Jeremiah Owyang is a well-known web strategist whom I enjoy reading, so even though I was already following Jeremiah on Twitter and thought the name looked funny, I went to the spammers profile.