theEweekly Wrap - Twitter, Yahoo slump, Google Analytics Intelligence and online news

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Richard Frost

Twitter goes commercial

Twitter has hit the headlines with its plan to introduce paid-for accounts. The micro-blogging service, which has never made a profit, will continue to offer a free service for individuals and businesses alike. But co-founder Biz Stone let slip in a BBC interview that Twitter would introduce paid-for corporate accounts, offering additional features such as analytics and feedback. Meanwhile, Orange has thrown its weight behind Twitter by becoming the first mobile operator to allow photo-sharing by MMS text. The company is also letting customers retweet and send direct messages on Twitter via an SMS. And as if that wasn't enough, Twitter is joining Facebook, MySpace and Bebo on Orange World's networking aggregator Social Life. Finally, if you want to understand how to track Twitter, check out theEword's blog on the National Football Museum's move to Urbis in Manchester. Or in Twitter-speak, @theeword's blog on @footballmuseum's move to @urbismanchester

Yahoo's search slump

The latest comScore rankings are out and they make grim reading for Yahoo. In October 2009, the internet giant's share of US searches nose-dived 0.8 per cent to 18 per cent. Bing seems to be gaining traction – a monthly rise of 0.5 per cent means Microsoft now accounts for 9.9 per cent of the search market. Unfortunately for Steve Ballmer and co, it's still no closer to Google. The world's biggest search engine also grew 0.5 per cent in October, serving 65.4 per cent of all US searches.

Google Analytics gains a brain

It may have escaped your notice but Google Analytics just got smarter. Google Analytics Intelligence automatically alerts online marketers to major changes in website traffic patterns. If there has been a significant drop-off in visitors from England or if there has been a spike in PPC hits, it will let you know. Google Analytics Intelligence also assigns a significance rating to each alert. But despite being hyped as your "dedicated assistant", there's still no sign of it making the coffee.

Breaking news

Finally, online news continues to be a key battleground for the search community. Rupert Murdoch may have accused the major search engines of stealing content from his beloved News Corporation. Unperturbed, Yahoo has made a raft of changes to improve the way it shows major news stories. Users searching for breaking news like the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch will now be presented with an enhanced version of the Yahoo News Shortcut. Basically, three more tabs have appeared at the top of the search engine results pages. 'Photos' shows them a selection of relevant images, 'videos' takes them to rich media content and 'Twitter' shows recent tweets and videos that have been shared on Twitter about the subject. Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf, of Yahoo Search, explained: "This is our first integration of fresh, social content like Twitter into web search, and we are planning to continue along these lines. In the future, we will enhance your search experience with more real-time content so you can find all the information you need about an unfolding news event in one place." Just don't tell Murdoch...

Urbis Manchester reaction played out on Twitter

Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Tom Mason

Urbis, the creative art space renowned for its inspiring exhibitions and off-the-wall galleries, is no more. Yesterday, it was decided that the exhibition centre would be replaced by the National Football Museum, which will move from its home at Preston's Deepdale stadium.

Tom Mason, theEword's resident social media watcher, examined the reaction to the news on Twitter. Here, he reveals how the local community responded to the announcement.

Urbis on Twitter

@UrbisManchester, better known as Vaughan Allen (chief executive at Urbis), has a strong following on Twitter. With just under 2,000 followers, the exhibition space is a popular account. It also features in 81 unique lists (collection of different Twitter accounts created by users).

Mentions of Urbis on Twitter

One hundred unique Twitter users posted an update featuring the word 'Urbis' between 1pm and 4pm on the afternoon of the announcement.

Examples included:

@SamStarling: Bah, National Football Museum moving into Urbis - this is a Bad Thing
@nimble_monkey: Urbis? A football museum? Insanity #Manchester

Trendistic allows users to quickly monitor the volume of a keyword over a set amount of time, while also displaying any tweets containing the search term. This tool can be used to discover just how popular a phrase or subject is. The Trendistic graph below shows the quantity of tweets relating to Urbis over a four-hour period yesterday afternoon.



Link popularity – using Bit.Ly

The Manchester Evening News account broke the story of Urbis' demise earlier on Wednesday afternoon. The link to the story on the newspaper's homepage was displayed as a short URL in a Twitter message and clicked 152 times. It was retweeted by 34 seperate accounts.

About Bit.ly

Bit.ly is one of the most popular URL-shortening programs. The software creates a singular short address for each link entered and allows users to monitor how many times a shortened URL has been clicked in its lifetime.

Mentions – Using Twitter Analyzer

Urbis was mentioned directly (with an '@' symbol) on 37 different occasions over the course of the afternoon.

One user, @travelsavecbaba, said:

"Arts bods in Liverpool & Salford gobsmacked by @urbismanchester decision."



If the number of RT and @ messages are combined, messages relating to Urbis and the National Football Museum were exposed to 15,938 unique different users.

Whether or not the decision to turn Urbis into the new home of the National Football Museum was a good idea remains to be seen, although it is likely to bring an increased number of visitors to the area (more so than the neighbouring Victoria train station, which this week was dubbed the worst in the country). It is clear though that the vast majority of tweets relating to the move are less than complimentary. Perhaps something for @UrbisManchester to address in the run-up to the change.

Google Analytics Intelligence gets proactive

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Richard Frost

Google Analytics has started highlighting major changes in traffic patterns. A new tool, Google Analytics Intelligence, alerts online marketers to potentially critical changes on their clients' sites. Available as a beta version, Intelligence can be accessed from the dashboard of the web analytics program.

Analyse this

The service is designed to boost the visibility of key trends and statistical anomalies. For example, online marketers can find out if there has been a significant drop-off in overall traffic figures, as well as more detailed data like fluctuations in organic search click-through rates and new visitors. By using complex algorithms to work out expected traffic patterns for a given site, Google Analytics Intelligence can draw attention to anything out of the ordinary.

Google Analytics Intelligence is explained in the following official Google video:

Google Analytics Intelligence – three categories

Currently, the alerts fall into three categories – daily, weekly and monthly. This enables online marketers to track both the day-by-day impact of a new ad campaign and the degree to which visitor levels are boosted in the following months.

Google Analytics Intelligence sends out alerts automatically, meaning account holders don't have to set aside several hours before they can start extracting insights. These reports have even been applied retrospectively to historical data so it's possible to see straight away how traffic patterns have evolved over time. However, power users can also set up custom updates if, for instance, they have specific performance targets in mind.


Countering information overload

Although the data is always available to view inside the Google Analytics account, online marketers can also choose to receive important updates via email.

Obviously, one potential problem of Intelligence is that users will suffer from information overload. Google has taken some steps to minimise this danger, though, by allowing online marketers to view alerts by dimension or metric and assigning a significance rating to each update. Furthermore, occasional users who would rather not receive 20 or more updates a day can filter out minor warnings by sliding the alert sensitivity bar to a lower setting.

Google Analytics – intelligent, not a silver bullet

Google Analytics Intelligence has the potential to become a powerful new tool for extracting insights from websites. Alden DeSoto, a member of the Google Analytics team, has described it as a "dedicated assistant" that is on call 24 hours a day and never misses a thing. However, it is far from a magic bullet solution that can reverse deep-seated SEO visibility issues.

Mr DeSoto explained: "Your new hardworking assistant, Analytics Intelligence, can't replace you or a professional analyst. But, it can find information for you and your professional analysts – so that your team can focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless stream of data."

theEweekly Wrap - New Bing features, Google court case and paid online news

Friday, November 13, 2009 by Tom Mason

Bing's busy week

Microsoft search site Bing announced a raft of changes this week. Aside from revealing a potentially lucrative partnership with computational search engine Wolfram Alpha, the fledgling Microsoft venture also publicised a number of brand new features. The major Bing news of the week came as the search engine unveiled a new video portal. The obviously named Bing Video replaces the Microsoft Video site and features content from the likes of YouTube, Hulu and US television network ABC. Bing also rolled out a new layout for its search engine results pages. The 'Advanced Hover Preview Feature' gives users the chance to view pictures of a website featured in a user query, as well as the inclusion of popular 'deep links' on listed sites.

Google goes to the bar

Google is back in court again. When it's not batting away lawsuits regarding the controversial book-scanning scheme, the search engine giant is regularly summoned by the law to defend its Google Maps application. This week, a Swiss data protection commissioner decided to pick a fight with the search engine after privacy concerns over the 360-degree map service. Hanspeter Thuer argued the current protection employed by Google to conceal the faces of those featured in the service was insufficient. He said: "Numerous faces and vehicle number plates are not made sufficiently unrecognisable." The move could see the maps service blocked from Switzerland until the ruling is complete. Google said it was 'disappointed' by the decision. Or, in three of the national languages of Switzerland, enttäuschen, décevoir and deludere.

Murdoch moves with the times

News kingpin Rupert Murdoch launched a scathing attack on the search industry this week as he accused Google and their ilk of stealing content. Murdoch, owner of News International (the company behind The Times and The Sun newspapers), blamed search engines for the decline in revenue across the print industry as a whole. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep." Murdoch, speaking to Sky News Australia, focused his rage of the news aggregation feeds offered by Google, Bing and all. He went on to say that all News International publications would deny Google access to content following the conversion to a subscription-only model in 2010.

Social mess

A date to add to the diary for all social-networking aficionados: The long-awaited Twitter and Facebook features are set to be released on the Xbox Live service on November 17th. The new additions will allow gamers to surf their favourite micro-blogging sites as well post photos and videos from games directly to the sites.

Cutts' Christmas cheer

Mr. Matt Cutts, liked and loved in equal measure by the search industry, has let slip some news about the release of the Google Caffeine update. Cutts, Google's head of Webspam, revealed that Caffeine – an update which slightly alters the way the search engine indexes web pages – would be released in 2010. Why the delay? According to Cutts, Google doesn't want to ruin anyone's Christmas by plummeting sites out of the rankings before the seasonal shopping rush. He wrote on his official blog: "I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holiday. [We want to] minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays." Well, it's a better present than a pair of socks.

Google Caffeine out of the sandbox

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 by Richard Frost

Google Caffeine is on the verge of being rolled out for real searches.

In August 2009, Google unveiled a preview version of a "next-generation architecture" dubbed Caffeine that it had been secretly working on for several months. Web developers and power searchers were encouraged to provide feedback on the update, described as the first step towards improving Google's indexing times, relevancy and comprehensiveness.

Google Caffeine set for rollout

Now, Google has closed the initial testing phase and indicated that Caffeine will go live at one data centre, which would affect a small percentage of regular users. Here's the (brief) message greeting visitors to the Google Caffeine test page:


But Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, was quick to offer reassurance on his personal blog that the search engine would not be transformed overnight. Having stated that "most searchers wouldn't immediately notice any changes with Caffeine", he added that the full launch will be postponed until after the holidays.

Google plays the waiting game

There are two reasons for this delay, he explained. Firstly, it will enable Google to collect feedback and improve Caffeine gradually. And secondly, it will minimise the potential for stressing out webmasters over the holiday period – a peak time for online sales.

However, Google has again given away very little about the details of the Caffeine update. It could turn out to be a major overhaul of how the search engine operates, which would obviously have serious implications for webmasters and SEO marketers. Or it could just be another one of Google's regular search updates, which for some reason has been given more publicity than the rest. To be honest, it's difficult to know until real users finally get their hands on the new-look Google.

In the meantime, Google is continuing to encourage feedback on Caffeine. All we can say is watch this space.