webqem blog

2013 is shaping up as a big year for Google Analytics.

The Google Analytics Annual Summit in October 2012 announced the launch of Universal Analytics, attribution modeling, cost data import, and the expansion of Google Analytics Premium into another eight countries. Surely Australia can’t be too far behind.

The two tools we’ve been enjoying recently at webqem are Dashboards and Shortcuts.

Dashboards

Dashboards have been around for a while, allowing you to create personalised dashboards to summarise the information that matters to you the most. Each Analytics profile comes with a default dashboard that can be easily modified, or you can create up to 20 additional dashboards, each with up to 12 widgets.

The default dashboard includes widgets for new visits, unique visitors, browsers, geography, duration, bounce rate, goal completions and revenue. However once you’ve defined your site objectives and analytics goals, you’re likely to add widgets that summarise your goals, conversion rate and best performing traffic sources. There are instructions at http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1068218&topic=1068215&ctx=topic

Google has an excellent gallery of pre-designed dashboards at http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/solutions-gallery.html. As dashboards are tied to your user account, you’ll need to save the dashboard to your chosen profile. Our favourites are the Social Media Dashboard, Mobile eCommerce Dashboard and the Site Performance Dashboard.

However there are limitations to the widgets you can add to your dashboard. Although you can create a widget that shows the top ten results for your metric, and filter the content, you can’t sort the results. And you may want the widget to click through to an existing Google Analytics report, again sorted by a particular column, filtered by particular content and with a particular secondary dimension.

That leads us into Google Analytics shortcuts.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts were a long overdue feature for Google Analytics.

Previously everytime you wanted to customise your report with segments, secondary dimensions, sort order, date range, date granularity, active tab and number of results, you had to manually apply them each time you logged in. Now you can customise your report – including custom reports – with the settings you prefer, and create a shortcut you can access with one click from the side menu.

They’re easy to create. Simply customise almost any report (excluding funnel visualisations) with your favourite settings, and click Shortcut. A popup will let you name the shortcut.

A hint – once you start creating shortcuts, it’s hard to stop. So choose a consistent naming standard and stick to it. That way when you’re creating widgets on your dashboard and you want the widget to link to a custom shortcut, you’ll be able to easily find it.

We’re all rather proud this week to have launched a new online competition celebrating OPSM’s sponsorship of the AFL.

Running now until 13 September 2012, the OPSM AFL Fan Face Off gives everyone the chance to share their passion for the game, have some fun and win one of six huge Grand Final packages.

Fans can choose from the desktop & mobile friendly website or install the iPhone app to get involved – checking out the current entries, voting for their favourites and submitting their own Fan Face Photo to be in the running.

Architecting and building the website (Employing a liquid, app-like design to ensure as many smartphone users as possible could get involved) and iPhone app in record time was no mean feat – but a lot of fun it has to be said. It helps when the client is also great fun to work with :-)

Download the app or visit the site now and vote for your favourite fan lunacy!

Facebook has announced that on March 30, all Facebook pages,including any brands and business pages, will switch over to the new Timeline Layout.

What is the Timeline Layout?

The timeline change at it’s most basic is a reorganisation of all of your brand’s Facebook posts, interactions, photos and events into a single long chronological view. This stretches back to your first interaction with Facebook and further if you have added events from your past.

When you visit a brand page in Timeline Layout, the experience becomes more personal. There is now a large ‘cover image’ at the top of the page allowing for customisation of your page to a greater extent than before. Your traditional profile picture is still used; this is square now and appears over the top of your large cover image.

Likes, photos, apps and custom pages are shown prominently below the cover image together with your brand description. You should be aware that the new layout shows very few of your apps/pages by default. How you order these is very important.

How to convert to the new timeline

Obviously new images will need to be created, both a new square profile picture and the larger cover image. Many companies are using these 2 images together creatively, with a visual connection between the two. It is important to remember, however, that your portrait image is still used in any posts you make and will appear alongside these in other’s timelines so branding and consistency is important.

The cover image is a great opportunity to show how creative you are as a company, this can be changed as often as you like. Whilst it should remain on brand it’s a perfect place for updating your page with campaign specific styling.

Before actually sending your page live with the new timeline view you will be given the opportunity to see how it looks to a consumer. Take the time to scan through the costs and if absolutely necessary remove any that you do not want to appear. Remember standard social media governance rules must apply, don’t remove anything that customers or followers have contributed to or still use.

Add depth to your timeline

The timeline change is a great opportunity to add the history of your company, update the page with milestones from your business’ past and be sure to include images and interesting facts. This will mean you have a rich and interactive timeline for users to browse through.

Update your apps & pages

Finally be sure to check old apps and pages to ensure they fit within the new layout. A benefit of this new layout is that app pages now have a lot more width to play with. Re-engineer your most popular pages to take advantage of this or ensure they are at least centered on the page.

How can we help you

We’re helping many of our clients with this transition and other aspects of their social media interaction in general. Contact us to see how we can help you.

A funny thing happened on the way home

I’ve had my hands on “The New iPad” (as Apple have so imaginatively named it) for 3 days now.

As anyone who follows these things will know – the changes to the device in this third generation are incremental and few, with some reviews asking “what’s the point?”. Basically, we’re looking at a higher resolution screen and a faster processor to replace an already more-than-adequate-for-the-task chip. Even Apple’s marketing seems a little lower key than usual (still breathlessly messianic of course, but less so than usual). It’s as though they are already mumbling an apology for the lack of significant updates.

Considering I spend much of my day concerned with wrangling pixels into shape, I was keen to see just how the new screen rendered familiar sites and apps. “Very, very nicely” just about sums it up. An impressive upgrade to the iPad display, but no game-changer. Or so I thought.

On the train home that evening I stopped consciously assessing the device and started just using it, browsing a couple of familiar news sites, as is my habit. I was some way into the journey when I suddenly became aware that, for the first time, I was browsing and reading with the iPad held in portrait, not landscape view. What was interesting to me was that this happened sub-consciously. I didn’t plan to make use of the extra resolution, I’d just rotated the display without thinking. And it was a vast improvement. What previously fitted across the width of the landscape orientation was now rendering with even greater clarity across the portrait orientation, but now there was a LOT more news fitting on the screen without scrolling. It instantly felt a much more efficient way to scan an info heavy news page.

Previously, we’ve canvassed opinion on which way people use their iPads – landscape or portrait and found there’s been some correlation between level of technical experience and age. In general it’s seemed that the younger or more tech-savvy user holds the iPad landscape for most things. Maybe because they’re used to sitting in front of a screen that’s that shape. The older or less tech-savvy user has picked up the iPad and more often browsed and read on the device with it held in portrait view. It’s the shape newspapers and books have been forever, right?

I predict we’re going to see more users shift increasingly to the portrait orientation by default as high resolution displays on the iPad and other tablets become the norm.

This might not sound like much of a revolution to many. But if you’re involved in designing and developing for the web (particularly information rich sites and apps) it’s an important shift that presents both new opportunities to make a much more usable experience, and some new challenges too. Sure, worrying about the ‘page fold’ is no longer fashionable (though good luck getting a client to seriously drop their “does that action button fit on the screen without scrolling” concern). But in the case of, say, an information dense dashboard, if we can fit much, much more on the screen (and a depth of 2048 pixels is a LOT more than we’re used to designing and building for) we can create an application that is not just better or more useful incrementally, but one that is potentially transformative – providing a genuinely improved way to view and interact with data.

Make no mistake – this is a potential game changer. For once, Apple’s marketing may actually have less hyperbole than required.

With AdWords Express rolling out across Australia, webqem received an invitation to try it out with a free $75 voucher this week.

It’s a bit superfluous – we already have an AdWords account, and as an Adwords Certified Partner manage client accounts through AdWords’ MCC (My Client Centre).

However we received the invitation as part of our Google Places account – Google’s local business listings.

This means that you could be receiving an invitation soon, assuming your local business is listed at Google Places.

If you haven’t setup a Google Places page, please see our guide at http://blog.webqem.com/2011/02/07/google-places-local-business-listings

With the names so similar, there will be confusion about the differences between AdWords, AdWords Express and Google Places.

The following table from Google’s help pages provides a good summary of what the products offer:

Google Place pages

• Google Place pages are  Google’s free local business listings.
• Google Place pages are intended for local businesses with a physical business address. They require verification, typically a phone number or a postcard to your business address.
• Google Place pages appear in organic search results for the category+location, appearing on maps with a red pin, and should contain your exact business name.

AdWords Express

• AdWords Express is a paid promotion system associated with your Google Place page, promoting the Place page (or your website if you prefer).
• AdWords Express text ads appear in the paid/sponsored search results and on Google maps with a blue pin for the category+location, and can contain custom descriptions.
• AdWords Express is intended for local businesses that do not already use AdWords, providing a simple low maintenance solution. A monthly budget is simply assigned to each business category on your Place page. They can help when your Place page is not ranking highly, and you want to stand out with a blue pin.
• AdWords Express Ads will include additional address and phone information.

AdWords

• AdWords is a paid promotion system with much greater reach and control.
• Adwords allows broader advertising over a larger area, unrestricted by geography or category.
• Ads can appear in sponsored results on the search and display networks, can be text, image or video ads and can be controlled with daily budgets, times, devices and many other settings.
• AdWords text ads may also include additional address and phone information from your Google Places page, if AdWords location extensions have been enabled.

The official video from the Google AdWords Express Produce Manager is shown below:

Google has provided additional instructions on setting up AdWords Express accounts.

Although webqem can’t use the free voucher – the small print on the back says it’s only for new self-managed AdWords customers – it is possible to run both Adwords Express and AdWords campaigns at the same time. The ads would potentially be competing against each other in the same ad auction if they were bidding on the same locality-based keywords/categories, however the simplicity of the AdWords Express setup, and the stand-out blue pins could make it an attractive option for many local businesses.

The 2012 Australian Open Tennis is on again in Melbourne – with the world’s best tennis players in action, including Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and local Aussie hero’s such as Stosur, Tomic and Hewitt.

Tennis Australia has enhanced the multimedia capability of its website by partnering with IBM and Ooyala. Ooyala is the platform delivering video highlights and the engine behind the scenes managing, tracking and reporting on all the video content. Seamless optimisation for desktops, mobile devices and, of course, the iPad, makes sure visitors get the very best user experience every time, wherever they are and whatever they’re using.

The Australian Open website uses a customised Ooyala video player that allows for videos to be tagged and filtered by different categories. They’re also utilising a logo watermark over the video feed, maximizing their brand positioning. Users can share their favorite videos with friends using Facebook, Twitter or email. The Backlot administration system behind Ooyala will allow their webmaster to track, measure and evaluate the most popular videos how well their content has been consumed and shared across the globe.

Pre-roll and hyper linking capabilities within Ooyala are used to allow key sponsors access to the pre roll spots before playing the video content. For example, McDonalds have leveraged this sponsorship opportunity to link through to their McDonalds Facebook page.

The Australian Open has leveraged the Ooyala Live streaming capability and provides live streams around the globe. By applying Geo-blocking functionality they are able to stream live feeds to markets that do not conflict with other contractual arrangements (So, if you’re viewing in Australia, you will be blocked from the live stream).

This is a great example of how Ooyala is supporting sporting bodies and corporations in leveraging the power of video and the Internet.

Find out more about how Ooyala can aid your video content management.

The numbers for 2011 are out and they’re pretty impressive! More than 45 million people visited a website created or managed by webqem this year.

This is the same as the number of:

• Tourists who visited New York city
• People who bought iPads
• Registered users on Dropbox

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