Friday, August 21, 2009

Google Rolling Out AdSense Relevancy Improvements

Google announced (subtly) that it is rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities to more accurately match relevant ads to AdSense publishers’ pages.

Unfortunately, not many details about these enhancements were given away, but Google says AdSense publishers will not have to update their AdSense accounts or ad code. Changes will be applied automatically.

adsense-logo

“Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance,” says AdSense Product Manager Woojin Kim. “In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don’t seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we’re continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.”

The changes will not affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites. Placement-targeted ads that advertisers bid on to appear specifically on your page, for example, will continue to appear.

These relevancy-determining changes are not the only thing the AdSense team has been up to. This week, they announced that they have tweaked the default fonts for different ad formats, in order to trigger better performance. Category filtering was also announced for AdSense for Feeds.

Google's Matt Cutts on .com Relevancy in UK

Some UK Google users have noticed that search results pages are showing more results from .com sites these days, than in the past. They are used to .co.uk sites getting better rank, and assuming that they are more relevant to their geographic location.

Certainly in some cases the .co.uk site would be more relevant to a UK searcher, but that is not always the case. Google's Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he answers a question on this subject from a user. The question was:

Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high on Google.co.uk since early June?
Cutts says it is true that searchers in the UK will see more .com results, and that is simply a product of Google getting better at determining geographic relevancy.

As Google gets better, they're more willing to show .com results if they're relevant to the country. "If the best result for a British searcher is something that ends in .com, we still want to show that to that British searcher," says Cutts.

According to Cutts, this is a change that Google will not likely reverse, although he does encourage users to let them know if they see such results that aren't relevant, because they would want to improve this.

The bottom line is that Google is just learning more these days about what sites are associated with what countries, and they're better at detecting it. The goal is to supply relevant results.

As a bonus, Cutts posted to his blog that he's already received some criticism about his answer in the above video and responded:

There’s a couple effects going on:

- first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely to see .coms in the UK. I’d say that’s 80-90% of the changes that people are seeing. Most of the generic TLDs (.com, .net, etc.) that are showing up now are .com sites like tescofinance.com and churchill.com that are relevant to the UK even though they don’t end in a .co.uk.

- I’ve been following some of the examples people have pointed out. I remember kiva.org in particular was mentioned and that probably is off-topic for the UK. I dug into that one, and it was an unrelated ranking experiment that was going on that we changed.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Google Suggest Suggestions for Indians & Americans




Google Suggest Suggestions for Indians & Americans


Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Google Update August 2009 Caffeine Update

Google start to make major changes in is search engine results.

Google Update August 2009 called “Ceffeine Update” are not been update yet in Google normal search results and been test in -> Google Caffeline Test.

this update look like it’s going to be more all about in site seo then links back.

i think this is a smart move from Google because this way the real interesting sites with content on them will rank hi then sites with lot’s of links just because webmaster that locking for links all day and paid of links instead of writing useful information, that is all about when a internet user looks for information in search engines.

i hope this will put an end of this links war and make the internet a better please

read more about this update at Matt Cutts Caffeine Update.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Analytics Data In Excel Through Our API

Many of our clients use Excel to manage their ad campaigns, visualize marketing performance, and perform complex data analysis. Most analysts use the Google Analytics Export feature to manually export their report data to CSV files. Then they import the CSV file into Excel. No longer! Now, with the Google Analytics API you can bypass this manual step and export Google Analytics data directly from within Excel! Once you’ve set it up, there’s no need to visit the Analytics reports to view data in Excel.

Thanks to a variety of developers, here are four solutions that can transform you from a reporting monkey to an analysis ninja (as Avinash would say).

  • VBA Macros – The simplest solution of them all. Mikael Thuneberg’s page explains how to make API requests directly from Excel using VBA Scripts and includes a pre-built Excel worksheet to get you started.
  • The Tatvic Excel Plugin – Another easy-to-use plugin for Windows users that supports both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007. To get started you download the plugin then register to use the tool. Its simple UI helps you build complex queries and get data from Analytics right into your Excel worksheet.
    Tatvic’s Plugin Query Builder
  • Excellent Analytics – Is an open-source initiative by Mark Red and Dropit. This Excel 2007 plugin works on Vista/XP and comes with a query builder to help you create Google Analytics queries and pull data right into Excel. Webanalytics.info put together a great step by step tutorial to get started using this plugin.
    Excellent Analytic’s Query Builder Interface
  • ShufflePoint – Works somewhat differently than the solutions above. ShufflePoint has developed a query language that works with the Google Analytics API to achieve common tasks, such as defining the last 30 days as a date range. One then uses this language to construct an Analytics Data Export API query either by navigating to a URL within Excel, or by using their web-based query builder, then importing this data into Excel. This process allows the ShufflePoint solution to work across most versions of Excel, as well as Powerpoint, and iGoogle gadgets.
    Shufflepoint’s Web Based Query Builder

We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it’s innovative and useful we’ll highlight it to our readers on this blog.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team