You can do all this and more using Advanced Segments. The latest Google Analytics in 60 Seconds video shows how to create a segment that includes only AdWords traffic and then how to refine that segment to include only a specific set of keywords. We illustrate how to isolate brand related keywords in the video, but with a little experimentation, you can create the AdWords segments that are most relevant to your business. Then you could compare how frequently visitors from each segment use the search box on your site (Site Search Overview report), how many new visits versus returning visits came from each segment (New vs. Returning report), and how many visits from each segment came from New York (Map Overlay report).

Our Google Analytics Seminar Leader, Benjamin Mangold from Mangold Sengers is making a special trip from his home country of Australia to teach the Google Analytics Intro and Advanced session.  These are great in person trainings and will jump start you in Google Analytics.  Return from these trainings with a practical understanding of how to use these products for your business along with some great tips & best practices.. and maybe some pictures of Elk and Bighorn Sheep.
They’re tooting the horns on how beneficial these courses are. Here’s what a recent attendee said:”Well worth it all, travel, money and the time spent at the seminar flew by. ”
David Wentworth Barton Publishing, attendee Seminars for Success, June 2009, Miami, FL

Google Analytics – Introduction & User Training Edmonton, Canada – Tuesday, July 7
Day one offers an introduction to Google Analytics and then some. Learn how to turn the sea of web analytics data into information that you can use to make the decisions that drive your bottom line. Day one topics include:

• Introduction to Web Analytics
• Common Interface Features
• Dashboard Reports & Customization
• Understanding Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, Goals and Ecommerce
• Motion Chart Visualization
• Analytics Best Practices for Branding, Lead Generation & Ecommerce
• And much, much more…

Google Analytics – Advanced Technical ImplementationEdmonton, Canada – Wednesday, July 8

The second day will show you how to install and configure the advanced features and capabilities of Google Analytics. We’ll show you how to use every ounce of this tool with tips and tricks, technical aspects, and how to avoid common problems. Day two topics include:

• Profiles and Strategies
• Filters – Uses and Implementation
• Goals & Funnels – Configuration & Setup
• Ecommerce Implementations
• Site Search, Event Tracking, Custom Reporting and Advanced Segmentation
• And much, much more…

Seats are limited, so register today for the July seminars!
Register for Edmonton, Canada Seminars

Posted by Eva Woo, Google Analytics Team

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/06/seminars-for-success-july-edmonton.html

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/08/api-sometimes-you-just-gotta-explore.html

A few years ago, Brian Clifton was working at Google in London, leading our team in Europe. Since then, he’s left to focus on growing his own Google Analytics Certified Partner called GA Experts From Omega Digital Media and written a fantastic book called Advanced Web Metrics With Google Analytics, which has just released a new edition. According to Brian, here’s what’s changed in the new edition:

“Since the first edition was published in 2008, a lot has changed – both for Google Analytics and the web as a whole. Remember two years ago hardly anyone had heard of Twitter. In that time Google Analytics has integrated with AdSense and Feedburner, launched event tracking, advanced segments, Intelligence alerts, motion charts, custom reporting, custom variables and the data export API. The new edition covers using all of these in detail from a practitioners point of view and with as many real-world examples as I could muster.”

It’s very well written and readable with screenshots – a great resource for all things Google Analytics. Ways to get the book:

A few months ago at the Google I/O conference, we were approached by Zach Steindler, a co-founder at Olark (a way to gain customer insight and sale better through live chat) who was raving about Google Analytics Annotations. He had such a great business case, we decided to let him rave here. Enjoy, and thanks Zach.

Making good business decisions is hard, and making the right one is even harder. At Google I/O I realized many people use Google Analytics but they aren’t familiar with the recent annotations feature that has helped us make smarter business decisions.

When we look at our Google Analytics, we don’t really care if our numbers are up or down; what we really want to know is why. This means asking a lot of questions, particularly questions about what happened when, like:

“How long has that ad trial been running?”
“When did we release that update to the website?”
“What happened after that last blog post?”

To answer these questions I might have to dig through e-mails, commit logs, and probably end up pestering my teammates for an hour while we try to figure out what happened when. But this is serious stuff; if our numbers went up 50% in a week, you better believe we want to know why so we can do more of it!

Annotations are exactly the tool we needed to answer these questions without having to pester teammates and dig through the past. If you don’t know, basically, they allow you to add notes of what events happened on a particular day. These notes are then visible for the different views in Google Analytics, so you can see how the events impacted your page views, goals, or whatever else you are tracking.

It seemed only sensible, given Google’s Psearch expansion, to have another look. And so last December we started a third round. Has anything changed? How much flux is out there? Well, read on and find out what we’re seeing so far…

Now, first things first; the goal wasn’t really to establish how personalized search operates. What we really wanted to know is how much movement is there in the SERPs for a given query type, in a given region (USA in this case). Yes we’re also noting some potential personalized search affects, but movement/flux was the core observation.

We must understand that even though there is some interesting data here, it is by no means a large enough sample to get nitty gritty with IMHO. It is also important to remember this is a specific task from a quasi-transactional query session (task development).

We want to go back and do more from an informational query space and one more suited to respondents (familiar, such as ‘learn SEO’ etc..). This approach, last time out, did show more movement than we saw with this space (we’ve done this round 2x now).

As always, no magic bullets here… Just more links in the chain (pun intended of course).

The Set up

We decided to take a set of queries to build a session (task) in a space that may or may not be familiar to the respondents. The queries we used were;

‘antique lamps’
‘buy antique lamps’
‘buy lamps online’

We also asked them to tell us;

1. Where they’re located (region/country)
2. Which browser they’re using
3. Cleared search history lately?
4. Is personalized/search history on?
5. Most common Google app used
6. If they had searched for ‘lamps’ or furnishings in the last 60 days

The goal being to start understanding what may or may not be influencing the search result flux. While we had some questions to be answered, there was no initial bias (hypothesis) behind the analysis. It should also be noted that the entire collection process only lasted 4 days so that we could try our best to avoid any temporal anomalies.

Today we’re looking at the data from the US. At the end of the test period there was really only enough to do analysis on the US and UK markets. I shall post the UK data in the coming weeks.

US Respondent Stats;

What have we learned?
It’s a good question, one that I don’t think we have a definitive answer to. Let us remember this is but one query type in a limited set. Personalization is more likely to have an effect in a query space where the user is more active in. That being said, there were some interesting elements that emerged so far.

Much like the original round of testing, a year ago, we can say that there is no massive upheaval where SERPs are vastly different from one user to another. This much has been consistent in each of the (3) rounds in both informational and transactional query spaces.

Here are some notes on other questions we’ve had;

Secondary observations

Other notes;
PPC and Uni results. – it was also interesting to see how the Shopping results popped in and out. While it is beyond the scope if this research, they were interesting and far more irregular than the SERP flux. This does play into one’s placement in the top 10 and is something to look at down the road.

Indented listings came and went (on final query) – another finicky element were the indented listings. It seems those can be more finicky than the average flux/movement in the SERPs. Looking for this in the next round and digging deeper if it persists is another area of interest.

Click data – given the suspicions of query analysis and task related triggers, in the near future introducing random clicks on links (and return/bounce?) might be worth putting into the mix. We haven’t given many signals beyond merely a 3 query task. If we get more evidence of this being an element, deepening the tasks seems a likely next route (past further rounds like this one).

What does it mean for SEOs?

Once upon a time this journey began because I really wanted to know if ‘rankings are dead’ and if ‘everyone gets a different SERP’. A few of the age old, but poorly understood, questions of the search world. So, have they been answered? Well, sort of.

We shouldn’t be changing how we approach things ultimately… Above the fold is the real estate that’s prime (what else is new?). It may be the measuring that we will have to adapt. You will need to find ways to check rankings from a few locales and discern a mean average instead of a definitive placement.

What’s next?

We really have only touched the surface so far (with this round) and are going to want to start looking at a few more things including;

As you may have started to notice, there are still a ton of elements which are unknown. This is why I am still not making any major calls on what we’re seeing. Please bear in mind that we’ve only 2 rounds last year and one recent set of data. This really only begins to give us some insight; nothing more. The last thing we need are SEOs running around taking any of this as gospel at this point.

In the short term we’re going to sort the UK data from this round and I will be posting about that in the coming weeks… Stay tuned.

Written by: David Harry

http://www.seoarticles.com/2010/01/21/google-continues-to-make-search-more-personal/

For quick keyword research, Aaron Wall has a Google Suggest tool forkeyword suggestions that adds more options and insight.

There’s some entertainment value to this as well of course. Start typing in “my girlfriend” or “my boyfriend” and you’ll see what I mean. Along those lines, let’s see some examples for each major search engine using the syntax, “Google is “:

And what about Yahoo?

Or Bing?

So, we have “Google is Skynet”, “Yahoo is better than Google” and “Bing is not Google”.   It’s amusing and insightful at the same time. As the clear market dominator, Google queries offer a peek into searchers’ perception of Google as a powerful force that can incite polarizing opinions.  Yahoo as a long standing second in the market brings about more functional phrases and just one indication of passion for the brand. While Bing shows some negativity, the good news is that they are inciting reactions from people. Better to make friends and enemies than for no one to notice you at all.

By the way, Google recently announced the addition of localized search suggest and spelling correction to the suggest features that searchers might find handy.

Written by: Lee Odden

http://www.seoarticles.com/2010/04/22/all-your-search-belongs-to-google/