Analytics, AdWords, and Big Spenders

A must see for any Google Analytics fan. Track commerece, spending, and adwords effectiveness all through Google Analytics. Learn how in 3 minutes.

via Google Analytics Blog by Sebastian Tonkin on 12/19/08

In the spirit of the holidays, we would like to offer tips on how to increase visibility into your e-commerce performance and your advertising spend using Google Analytics. For many, seasonality influences purchasing decisions and affects business revenues. Analytics can help keep a close eye on your advertising spend and e-commerce trends to run a cost conscious business.

We recommend 3 simple methods captured in the videos below. You can find these videos and more on the new Google Analytics Youtube Channel.

1. Use Google Analytics to track your e-commerce activity. As an e-commerce site, you likely want to know who is visiting your site and the goods they are purchasing. By enabling E-commerce tracking on your site, Google Analytics will provide vital metrics including overall revenue, revenue per product, average transaction amount, and more.

Coupled with our Motion Charts feature, you can easily see how the the products trend over time by various dimensions including: revenue, quantity, and average price.

2. Identify your high spenders to better target your website promotions and ad spend. With additional information on ROI for keywords and spending trends, you can focus your efforts on the traffic you care about the most.

3. Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to track ROI, Revenue per Click, campaign and keywords performance. Added benefits include drilling down to the ad campaign, ad group, and keyword levels for goals conversions and e-commerce transactions.

And don't forget, even a few minutes a day with Google Analytics can help your website.

Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

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100Mbps to My House? Yes Please!

There is talk that for $44 billion the US could get internet overhauled to allow for faster internet. Most people that have broadband are on 3-15 Mbps connections, which isn't bad, but we could do even better!

The main issue is that the US is so spread out that upgrading the infrastructure of our network is costly. With Obama soon to take presidency and wanting to create jobs, it wouldn't be a bad idea to fund this project and create new jobs - at least while it's being built. Since it's geared more toward areas that are underserved (meaning not Denver Metro area), it certainly could encourage companies like Comcast or Qwest to upgrade their networks and prvovide a faster, cheaper service to it's customers.

Mircosoft has deemed Blu-Ray and all physical High-Definition content walking zombies - they think that streaming HD content is where the money is at. Right now, it's not feasible because we have too slow of internet overall. To stream a Blu-Ray quality movie, you'd need a pretty beastly connection. 100 Mbps would do the trick I think!

I am all for faster internet, but I also think Blu-Ray will be around for a long time~

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iPhone Users List - Early Late Edition

Welcome to another late edition of the the SRG iPhone Users List. This weeks apps come by request. I encourage everyone to post comments, questions, and requests via The SRG InfoTech Blog.

The user list continues to grow this week. We have now reached 35 iPhone users. I expect that number to approach 50 after Christmas. To ease the burden of deploying several iPhones at once, Apple has released the iPhone Configuration Utility. This will allow geeks like me to create a URL where you automatically download and install all the settings for an SRG iPhone configuration.

One of the many flaws in the iPhone is it's inability to use the keyboard in landscape mode while typing emails and text messages. The inability to cut & paste is another. This week I'll talk about apps that solve those problems.

PasteBud is a web based app that allows you to cut & paste on the iPhone. I've tinkered a little bit with this app, and it is essentially worthless. They have taken a basic computing function (cut & paste) and made it so complex that it's not worth doing. I'd only recommend trying this out if your are absolutely desperate to cut & paste on your iPhone.

The request from this week was for an app that allows you to type in landscape mode when composing emails and text messages. Out of the box, the iPhone is not capable of this. Through the magic of third party software this function has been implemented. For whatever reason, there is no single app that enables this in email and text messaging. You need separate apps for each function. For email you have Big Keyboard Email, & TouchType. For text mesaging you have SMS Touch, and SMS Landscape Big Keyboard. Apparently TouchType ($.99) and SMS Touch ($4.99) are the most popular of these apps. The developer claims they were not bundled into one app because it was more costly to develop the SMS version, and he wanted to keep the price down on the email version. I have not tried either of these apps. If you do, please let us know what you think.

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