Google Analytics Product Update: Remarketing, Better Content Experiments, and Page Value

Use your web insights to power remarketing and win more customers Remarketing with Google Analytics lets you tap into rich insights about your website visitors who show an interest in your products and services--and then show them targeted ads across the Google Display Network that respond directly to their preferences. It’s an effective tool to turn your visitors into customers. Learn more

Optimise your content with Content Experiments Content Experiments is now in 100% of Google Analytics accounts. Plus, we've made some exciting improvements: you can now copy experiments, use relative URLs, and see Site Usage, Goal Set, and Ecommerce tabs in the Experiments report. Learn how well different versions of your pages work in getting visitors to complete your goals, and use this insight to make your site more effective. Look for the Experiments report in the Content section of your account. Learn more

Learn the value of your pages Use the Page Value metric (formerly $Index) to learn how much revenue has been contributed by a page or set of pages in comparison to the rest of your website. If you have goals set up, go to any Content report, and you'll see Page Value in the last column. Learn more

Case Studies and Education

Case Study: WBC used advanced segments to increase conversions by 12% By tracking micro-conversions and using advanced segmentation, Periscopix (WBC's SEM marketing agency) found that a high conversion rate for loyal customers was hiding a very low conversion rate for new users. After A/B testing of subtle updates that made their homepage more accessible to new users, they found a winning combination that drove a 12% increase in conversions. Learn More Follow us on Google+ for tips, trends and news To gain insights about Analytics and learn from industry leaders, check out our popular posts: • Move beyond PageViews and look at Conversions • Why you must measure Social • Search Attribution: do more with AdWords Search Funnels • Next Chapter of Analytics: retiring the old version Watch: "Building Blocks of Digital Attribution" This intermediate level webinar covers the basics of what attribution is and how you can better value your marketing investments. Watch and enjoy.

How to Offer a print-friendly version of your wordpress website?

As Web pages get more and more complex with images, ads, and links all over the place, they become harder and harder for people to read. Combine that with the eye-strain caused by most monitors and you create an environment where people want to print out Web pages.

Many Web designers feel that if a Web page is written for the Web, that's where it should be read. But some Web pages can be difficult to read online, either because of the ads and flashing blinking images, or because they are so long that it's easier to read them in print. For how to articles, it's easier to have the article printed out to follow along with, perhaps writing notes or checking off the steps as they are completed.

Print Friendly and PDF Button for WordPress websites:  http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/printfriendly.3.0.8.zip

Description

The Print Friendly & PDF button saves paper and ink when printing or creating a PDF. It's fast, easy, and looks great when printed. Add the button now, and your users will see the difference.
How Print Friendly & PDF Works
The Print Friendly & PDF button automatically creates printer friendly and PDF versions of your pages without the hassle of having to create a print CSS file. No coding, hacking or programming required. Simply install the Print Friendly & PDF plugin, activate, and choose settings for full customization. It also gives your user the ability to remove images and paragraphs of text, so they really only have to print exactly what they want.
Cool Features For You:

• Get a Printer Friendly and PDF button for your users.
• Fully Customizable! Choose your favorite print and PDF button, use a text link, or use your own graphic.
• Get precision placement with easy to change margins, alignment, and pages for your Print and PDF button.
• On-Page-Lightbox. Have you noticed that other printer friendly buttons open new windows, or tabs? Not with Print Friendly & PDF button. It opens in a Lightbox so you your users stay on the page, and your wp website.
• Professional looking print and PDF buttons and user experience.
• More repeats and new users. Your brand/URL are printed on the page or saved in the PDF so users remember your site and new users can find you.

Cool Print Features for Users: * Optimizes pages for printing and PDF so you save money and the environment. * You can Print or get a PDF. * Edit the page before printing or getting a PDF: remove the images and paragraphs you don't need to save ink!

Installation

1. Search for PrintFriendly in your WordPress backend and click install, or download the printfriendly.zip file and unzip it.
2. If you downloaded the zip, upload the printfriendly folder into wp-content/plugins folder
3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress Admin area.
4. Select "Settings" to customize button style and placement.

FAQ

I set the button to align left / right and it doesn't align right!

Check whether your theme includes the required CSS class, PrintFriendly uses these to align your button. If that doesn't work for you, uncheck the "Add CSS to Pages" checkbox and style the button yourself.

The Print Friendly button is loading but it's not doing anything, what's wrong?

Check the "JavaScript fallback" checkbox in the settings and check again. If the button starts working now, the JavaScript isn't loading correctly. Check your source for a mention of cdn.printfriendly.com/printfriendly.js. If it's not there, make sure your theme has the required wp_footer call.

Some of the input fields in the admin are disabled!

If you've disabled the loading of CSS and / or set "Add PrintFriendly To" to Manual, some of the input boxes will be disabled as you've basically disabled that functionality.

I'm manually adding the button but it's aligning wrong!

If you're getting unexpected results, you might want to set Horizontal Alignment to "None".

I still need help!

If you have any other issues with the plugin or the PrintFriendly widget, please write to support@printfriendly.com.

A Review on “Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS”

by: Nashville

If you want to produce outstanding and award-winning movies instantly, you can count on Adobe Photoshop CS software and its integrated web production application software. Photographers, graphic artists, web designers, and video professionals can take advantage of its indispensable features such as new design possibilities, improved file management, a more intuitive way to create for the web, and support for 16-bit images, digital camera raw data and non-square pixels. With it, you can truly create the highest quality results more efficiently than ever before. Truly, Adobe Photoshop CS is destined to become important.

According to the article “Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS” by Michael Ninness which was posted at http://movielibrary.lynda.com, the book is a series of movie-based tutorials designed to help Photoshop users to become faster and more productive. Although the tutorials are grouped by topic, each movie is packed with timesaving tips and shortcuts and can be viewed independently. The included topics are palette shortcuts, screen mode shortcuts, navigation shortcuts, selection shortcuts, type shortcuts, dialog box shortcuts, file browser shortcuts, view shortcuts, layer shortcuts, and image adjustment shortcuts.

Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS brings with it many new things. I absolutely don't agree with those people who say that it is difficult to learn Photoshop CS when in fact, it isn't! Tutorials, such as Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS, can help you in the learning process. Those of you who are not afraid of experimentation especially in movie making, this is the perfect time for you to enjoy this great field and become a movie making savvy person. All you need to learn, especially if you're learning on your own, are the desire and passion to improve your digital images, the flair to experiment, and excellent tutorials to guide you along the process.

You’ll truly enjoy using Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS because there are endless possibilities to create anything that you desire. Of course, you have to be familiar and must be fairly advanced with the Photoshop CS program – this is a big thing. And, I can only assure you of one thing – Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS is worth every penny that you’ll spend for it. I must say that it’s one tutorial that’s worth buying.

Truly, it's hard to believe that Adobe keeps on producing these kinds of stuff to help its avid users in the completion of their art projects. Now, creating films is very much simple through Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS. Everything about these tutorials is a plus. Definitely! With it, you can totally do loads of other things and you’ll surely love Power Shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS. Congratulations and more power to Michael Ninness!

If You Build It, They Will Come...

by: Adrian Kennelly

...No they won't. On the web, building a web site is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, no-one is going to visit it. The site won't even be listed in any of the search engines without some incoming links. To get traffic, you will need to do some promotion.

Web Directories
The basic part of any promotion campaign, web directories, whist they may not generate much in the way of traffic, will help in your site's search engine ranking. A good list of free, non-reciprocal, search engine friendly directories can be found at http://info.vilesilencer.com.

Pay Per Click Advertising
This is advertising such as PPC Search Engines, like Yahoo!'s Overture, and contextual advertising, like Google's AdWords. Be warned, it is very easy to go through a substantial amount of money for no reward using these services if you are not careful. AdWords (amongst others) lets you pick a maximum budget a day, but, although $5 may not sound like much, $5/day is $150+ per month. Better make sure your keywords are correctly identified, and, in preference, not highly competed on, and that your sales copy is good enough before doing this.

Quality Traffic, not Just Traffic
It's what everyone is after, more traffic to their website. Traffic is easy to obtain, though. Autosurfers, manual hit exchanges and purchased traffic will all send visitors to your website. However, this traffic is just visitors, many of whom will just burn up your bandwidth for no reward. Unless you are receiving decent money for pay per impression advertising, such as banners and popups, this traffic can be totally valueless.

Repeat Traffic
Unless you only require visitors to visit your site once, because you are selling a one-off product, and your sales copy is fantastic enough that they are hooked to buy on the first visit (and if you are regulary doing this, write an ebook explaining how and sell it), you will want visitors to return. If there is nothing of value at your site, visitors may come once, but they won't come back of their own accord. Typically, it is estimated that a prospective customer will be exposed seven times to a product etc. before buying.

Reciprocal Linking
Whilst somewhat frowned upon, and generally thought to not be as valuable as one-way linking (see below) for search engine optimization, a relevant reciprocal linking campaign can be an important traffic generating tool. swap links with sites in a related, but non-competing, business to your own. It isn't really a good idea to link to competitors; although visitors will be interested in your product, there is a good chance you will lose them to your competitor, especially if their website or product is better or looks better than your own. Not a desirable outcome. For example, a web hosting site could link to a site that sells scripts and programs; visitors to one will more than likely use the other, but the sites are not in direct competition. You can also swap links with web directories that require a reciprocal link.

One-Way Linking
Considered the best form of link for SEO purposes, this can also be a good source of traffic. There are a number of ways of getting one-way links. The easiest is submission to free web directories (see above). Another good source is by writing articles relevant to your site or industry, putting a resource box at the bottom, then posting the article on the directories such as GoArticles, or by sumbitting to the ezines. Webmasters and ezine publishers are always in need of fresh content, and will publish your article for free. The hardest way of getting one-way inbound links is by having websites voluntarily link to you. The only way to do this is by providing a valuable tool, service or resource that other webmasters will want to direct their visitors to

Google offers search tips to help Chinese avoid disconnection

Report From news.cnet.com

Google will now offer Chinese users alternatives for search terms that it has determined are likely to result in disconnection.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET)

 

Chinese Internet users have long grappled with frequent disconnections and service interruptions -- often immediately after doing a Google query, and today, the search giant has come up with some workarounds that could help.

"Over the past couple years, we've had a lot of feedback that Google Search from mainland China can be inconsistent and unreliable," Google wrote in a blog post today. "It depends on the search query and browser, but users are regularly getting error messages like 'This webpage is not available' or 'The connection was reset.' And when that happens, people typically cannot use Google again for a minute or more."

Now, Google said it has determined that its own systems are not the cause of the problem. At the same time, it said it analyzed 350,000 popular keywords and discovered some that are prone to cause problems (see video below). And in a bid to help Chinese users avoid the temporary disconnections, the company said it will begin offering warnings when a query is likely to cause a problem, as well as suggestions of alternate search terms that are less likely to do so.


"Starting today we'll notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues," Google wrote. "By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on."

Interestingly, in a country whose government is well known for censoring certain use of the Internet, it seems that the keywords that result in service disruption can sometimes be altogether random. And that can be quite frustrating to users simply trying to get through a normal workday.
In his post "Google and the Great Firewall: An Interesting New Twist," Atlantic writer James Fallows weighed in on the Google news.

First, Fallows explained how Chinese users access Google in the wake of the company's confrontation with the Chinese government two years ago: "Google moved its Chinese search servers outside the mainland, to Hong Kong. People in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere on the mainland can still use Google, but their queries must pass through 'Great Firewall' filters on their way out to Hong Kong and then back in again."
Added Fallows, "The brilliance of the multi-layered screening systems that together make up the Firewall is that they are neither airtight nor fully predictable. Unless you are brazenly searching for some obviously taboo term, you're never certain what exactly has triggered a blockage -- or, often, whether your query is being blocked at all, versus your having run into some routine internet problem."
And this is where Google is trying to offer some help.

"We've observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts," Google wrote in its blog post. As a result, its search engine for China will now highlight potential problem terms as users type, and then offer a drop-down menu with an "interruption" link, "which takes them to [a] help center article. They can continue with their original query (which will likely lead to an error message), or click 'Edit search terms,' which will remove the highlighted characters and prompt users to try other search terms....In order to avoid connection problems, users can refine their searches without the problem keywords."

For Fallows, Google's new approach to this problem is "worth study on the ongoing rich question of China's conflicted embrace of the Internet."

As well, Fallows notes one of his reader's reactions to Google's move: "I like it; it's not only helpful, but serves as a constant, in-your-face reminder to users in China that the government is censoring search results to such an extent that even seemingly innocuous words can get one's connection interrupted. In other words; it's a passive aggressive way for Google to point out just how insecure the Chinese government is."