Google Analytics Premium: Better Support & Goodbye Data Sampling

Today Google launched a paid version of Google Analytics that processes higher volumes of page views and provides additional support. The general feature set and user experience remain the fundamentally the same as the standard product. This comes as an important addition to the enterprise set of tools that Google offers. The new version audience is mainly enterprises that receive a high amount of traffic and need a certain commitment from Google’s part on data collection, up-time, and support.

The new Google Analytics premium is not about features, as shown below there are few capabilities available on the premium version that are not available on the standard version. It is designed for organizations who value guaranteed availability, dedicated services and support; it is also critical for sites who want to process data more frequently and without sampling.

Below is a detailed description of the tool capabilities, availability, support and pricing.

Google Analytics Premium – Product Description

Processing Power

• Guaranteed processing for up to 1 billion hits per month (vs. the 10 million a month for standard accounts).  This applies to a single business or enterprise, but can include multiple web properties. In other words, if a company owns several sites, but the combined volume is under the 1 billion limit, all can be part of one premium instance, but if each site may reach the 1 billion limit separately, then the company would need to pay separately for each site.
• Faster, intra-day processing
• Service Level Agreement around data collection, reporting, and processing
• 99.9% on Collection up-time
• 99% on Reporting up-time
• 98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)

Advanced Analysis Tools

• Up to 50 Custom Variable slots (the standard version provides 5)
• Unsampled report downloads for custom report requests
• Unaggregated report downloads for large report requests (up to 1 million rows per download)

Dedicated Support

• Dedicated Account Management
• Phone & Email support 10 hours per day, 5 days per week (relevant to the time zone in which the contract was signed)
• Implementation Consultation & Tagging Audit
• Live & Webinar Training
• 24/7 Product Emergency Escalation Support, if the product is ever outside of the SLA

Pricing & Availability

At first, Google Analytics Premium is is available to companies based in the US, UK, and Canada, although the sites can be located globally. However, according to Google, it will expand into other regions as quickly as possible.

Prices varies per region and will be as follows: $150,000 USD (US), $150,000 CAN (Canada), or GBP 90,000 (UK) per year (billed in monthly increments).

User Interface Changes

As mentioned above, Google Analytics Premium is not about a new set of features. The interface is almost identical to the standard interface we are used to. I believe this is an advantage for users, as most people are already acquainted with the tool and won’t have to get to know another interface.

The following differences can be seen in the tool (screenshots from Analytics Premium a website developed by Cardinal Path, a Google Analytics premium reseller):

• When you click the “Download” button on a report, you will have the option to request an “Unsampled Download”

• There will be an “Unsampled Downloads” section in the Custom Reports tab

• Up to 50 custom variables will be available in the Custom Report builder

Google’s also released this video about it:

Who Should Use Google Analytics Premium

One very important question that comes to mind is: does this mean that Google is not going to invest in the free version moving forward? According to Google:

We are more committed than ever to our standard version. With the release of Google Analytics v5 we are poised to release features faster than ever and are confident that measurement can keep up with the digital consumer journey at last. In the last 3 months alone we’ve released many great features to the new version of Google Analytics.

Another important question is: do I need Google Analytics Premium? That question is a bit trickier. Here are a few cases where you should certainly consider the premium version:

1. If you are currently using a paid tool: the advantage of GA Premium is that pricing is not based on pageviews or hits or visits. If your site generates 1 billion hits per month (in which case you are probably paying a very high amount), now you can use Google Analytics with a higher level of accuracy. In addition, you can feel safe that in case you lose your web analytics budget, you can downgrade to the standard Google Analytics without losing your data or needing to switch tags (and can upgrade again later).
2. If you are using standard Google Analytics and currently getting sampled data and unsampled data is important for you you. Some websites generate large amounts of data, which results in data sampling on Google Analytics. The premium version will power the collection and processing of this information, in addition to have higher data limits (1 billion hits a month). A plus is that the reports should load faster and data will be fresher, even at larger volumes.
3. If your website visitors need to be segmented in more ways. By offering 50 custom variables (the limit now is 5) Google will enable more segmentation options, usually needed on large and complex websites.

Closing Thoughts

This release comes as great news for the industry, as it shows how strategic is Analytics to Google and how much they are willing to invest in it. The unsampled reports and the SLA are great differentials (which were always used by Google’s competitors on the field). It means it will bring the market up and we will keep seeing advancements in this arena.

One single feature that is still not on the level of the competitors is user access management. As of today there are only two types of users on Google Analytics: Administrator and Viewer. For SMB and enterprises this is not enough in order to administer who sees what and who can change the tool settings. As mentioned in an article about Analytics User Management: “Everyone who has access to a web analytics tool needs to take responsibility for that access.”

To summarize, in an interview with Thomas Davenport he said that “it ain’t about the math, it is about the relationships”. Google’s strategy to first conquer the end user (i.e. analysts, SEMs, and more recently marketing managers) and then go for the enterprises looks very smart. Google Analytics is by far the most used tool, and this can only count in favor when an enterprise is choosing a tool, employees are already comfortable with it.

About The Author: Daniel Waisberg is the Founder of Conversion Journey, a consultancy that provides insights on improving the performance of websites. He is also the founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement & Optimization website. See more articles by Daniel Waisberg

Article Taken From http://searchengineland.com/

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Anchor text is perhaps one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization but it is also one of the least talked about.

This one element of SEO is important to understand because it can help your page get ranked for a target keyword and also help you evaluate your competition more precisely.

The latter is critical and, in fact, if you don't take anchor text backlinks into proper consideration when looking at the competition for a keyword you could be missing out on some hidden gems that are easy to rank for.


What Is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the hyperlinked text you see on a webpage. It is the visible words that you can click to take you to another page. Anchor text html code looks like this:

<xmp><a href="http://www.yoursite.com">Your Anchor Text</a></xmp>

On most websites, you typically see this as blue text that is underlined and when you click on it with your mouse, you are taken to the corresponding url.

How Bloggers Use Anchor Text

Bloggers and website owners use anchor text naturally to point to other pages on their website as well as pages on other sites that they find relevant to what they are blogging about. You've probably even done this yourself when writing a post where you referenced another post on your site, an affiliate product or even a post on another site.

Usually a blogger will use a phrase that indicates what the page is about in the anchor text, as opposed to a url, so that the sentence reads correctly.

The anchor text in these links helps both the visitor and the search engine spiders figure out what the 'linked to' page is about.

How Search Engines Use Anchor Text

Search engines use anchor text to help them figure out what the hyperlinked page is about. So, as you can see, getting anchor text backlinks with relevant phrases in the anchor text is pretty important if you want the search engines to rank you for a particular keyword phrase.


In fact, anchor text is such an important factor in ranking a page that pages can rank for a keyword phrase even when that phrase does not appear in the url on the page!

There are several cases where this has happened, but perhaps the most famous is where the Adobe Reader download page ranked number 1 for the search term 'click here' for many years even though those words were nowhere on the page. So many people had linked to that page using the anchor text 'click here' that it got to the number 1 spot without any on page SEO for the term.

Search engines place a large importance on external anchor text (links coming in from other sites) and some importance on internal anchor text (links from within your own site) when ranking a page so it stands to reason that you should make getting anchor text backlinks with your target keyword phrases a priority.

One important thing to note is that it is widely thought that if two links on the same page target the same url, that only the first link is counted by Google so you want to be sure that you use your desired anchor text in that first link.

How Anchor Text is Important When Judging Competition for a Keyword

If you think about how important anchor text is to the search engines when determining ranking for a keyword, then it's easy to see why it is a critical component of analyzing the competition for a particular keyword phrase.

Google even provides you with a search operator to do this - the allinanchor operator. You can use it by typing the following into the Google search bar:

Allinanchor:"your keyword phrase"

This will return the pages which have anchor text pointing to it that contain the quoted keyword phrase.

I hope you can see how powerful this is - first of all, Google must think it is an important element of a page because it provides the allinanchor operator. Just the existence of the operator would seem to indicate that it uses the anchor text when deciding what a page is about and ranking it.

Secondly, using this operator will show you which pages are optimizing for your chosen keyword phrase!

It makes sense that only the pages that have anchor text backlinks with your phrase are the ones optimizing for it so you can forget about searching for your phrase in quotes or any of that nonsense.

Not only that but, you can take a look at the actual backlinks for each of your competitors and see how many of them have that anchor text and what the strength of those links are to make a more educated guess as to how difficult they will be to beat out for that top spot.

Anchor Text "Best Practices" For Your Website

Now that you know how important anchor text is to your rankings, I'm sure you will want to pay more attention to it in your SEO efforts but you don't want to go hog wild and create tons of anchor text backlinks all with the same keyword phrase or you might find that your efforts don't yield the results you want.

Here are some things to consider:

1. Vary Your Anchor Text - We all know that Google prefers it when people link to you naturally and when that is the case, they don't all use the same anchor text. So, when you are linking to your site from your articles or web2.0 properties you want to make sure you don't always use the same phrase as well. Using your target phrase in about 50% - 60% of the links is probably a good idea.


About The Author
Anchor text backlinks play a key role in SEO. Get a free copy of Lee's "Website Promotion Blueprint Guide" to get more website traffic: http://hypertracker.com/go/leedobbins/PhantomWriters/.

Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

At Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization we know that knowledge is power. That's the reason we started this SEO blog. We know that the better informed our visitors are, the better the decisions they will make for their websites and their online businesses. We hope you enjoy your stay and find the SEO news contained within this blog useful.

Blogging Trackbacks, Pingbacks & SEO

There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst newbie bloggers over the definition and use of trackbacks, pingbacks and how they can be used for SEO. If you have done any blogging before and have comments enabled, you probably realized very quickly that the amount of spam that comes from the comments of your post can be quite overwhelming.

Comments on blogs are often criticized as lacking authority, since anyone can post anything using any name they like and because there is no verification process available to ensure that the person is in fact who they claim to be.

Trackbacks and Pingbacks were implemented in an effort to provide some level of verification to blog commenting. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).

Trackbacks

A Trackback shows an excerpt from an originating blog post and is editable by the trackback recipient. Trackbacks are an automated process of notifying a blog when you make a post that references it. By sending a trackback, you create a link back to your blog from the blog you are referencing. The trackback was designed to provide a method of notification between websites and a method of sharing comments on a person’s blog but having them show on your own blog as an excerpt for your readers to view.

Person A’s blog receives the trackback and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s original post. The excerpt then acts as a teaser and encourages the reader of person A’s blog to go to the originating source of the post to read more.

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog generally gets posted along with all the comments. This means that Person A can edit the contents of the trackback on his own server, which means that the whole idea of “authenticity” isn’t really solved. Person A can only edit the contents of the trackback on his own site. He cannot edit the post on Person B’s site that sent the trackback.

When you want to use the trackback feature, you will need to use a special link provided on the blog you want to reference. Most trackback links appear just after the blog post content and before the comments and will sometimes appear as a plain text link.

Pingbacks

Pingbacks were introduced as a method to alleviate some of the issues that people found with trackbacks lacking authenticity. Pingbacks allow you to notify a blog of your entry just by posting its permalink directly in the content of your blog entry.

This leaves all editorial control over the posts exclusively with the author. This automatic verification process grants a level of authenticity which ultimately makes it more difficult to fake a pingback. No special Trackback link is necessary and the Pingbacks do not send any content. In order for Pingbacks to work, you must enable them within WordPress.

Some feel that trackbacks are superior because the readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say before deciding if they want to read more and follow the link to the orginal blog source. Others feel that pingbacks are superior as they create a verifiable connection between posts. Pingbacks are akin to having remote comments.

SEO

Many blogging platforms treat the links from trackbacks, pingbacks and comment as "nofollow" so that you do not lose any link-juice or other SEO "value" in using them. Other than the rare “diamond in the rough” link you might acquire from using these features, there is not much SEO value to Trackbacks or Pingbacks. However, it is possible that you may get some value from these tactics after linking to an authoritative site such as the Google Blog which may bring in a lot of traffic to your site.

It is good to link to others in your posts, but it does not mean you have to allow pingbacks or trackbacks. If you do decide to use these features, you should beware of sending both a trackback and a pingback. This creates two separate links on the blog you are referencing and could be considered spam. Of course you should only trackback or pingback if you actually reference the site you are sending the trackback to.

For further information, please refer to the online documentation from WordPress in their Introduction to Blogging.

SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 12:26 pm

Google has worked the most-requested features from its older interface into its new one, including creating scheduled reports and viewing channels on the Home tab. Now, it’s getting ready to sunset the old interface, as of mid-November.

So, Google is urging AdSense publishers to take the time now to familiarize themselves with the new interface, though they’ll still be able to toggle back and forth for the next few weeks.

Image provided by Google

The new AdSense view includes multi-dimension reporting, reporting by country and platform, and the addition of search functionality in the Ad Review center. Users can also edit and schedule reports.

Google originally released the new AdSense interface in November of last year, after beta-testing it for a year. Since then, it has been tweaking features in response to user feedback.

You Can Also Read This Below:

• Google Releasing Beta AdSense Interface To All Publishers
• Google Tweaks New AdSense Interface
• Google AdSense Updates Ad Layouts

The search industry is getting a little more mainstream recognition every day, as tonight’s episode of The Colbert Report picked on Google’s handling of the Spreading Santorum situation.

This time the target was software engineer Matt Cutts, long known to search industry insiders as head of Google’s Web Spam and search quality team, he doesn’t often get the same national media spotlight as Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin or Larry Page.

But as the man responsible for weeding out poor quality content from Google results, Cutts made the late night news desk.

First notified of his Comedy Central debut on Twitter by@LornaHarris (Danny Sullivan’s better half, btw), Cuttsapparently didn’t have any prior indication that Colbert’s team of writers would go so far into investigating the history of Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem”.

In his usual brand of snarky political commentary in “the Word” segment, Stephen Colbert mentioned Matt Cutts (at in the video below) as he cut into Google over this week’s anti-trust Senate hearings and raised potential free speech issues around changing search results.

Cutts is mentioned at 2:45 in the clip below:

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word – I Think, Therefore I Brand
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Colbert cited a blog comment made by Cutts back in December 2010, on John Battelle’s blog:

The quote reads:

“our web search results are protected speech in the First Amendment sense”

Of course, Colbert mocked the statement with a jab about how the founding fathers surely thought ahead to protect Web documents as free speech:

We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of hacked Scarlett Johansson nude pics.

Congratulations Mr. Cutts, you’ve made the big time now! (Maybe next time you’re in New York, you’ll have an easier time getting those tickets you wanted to the Colbert show.)

Happy Birthday Google! Today, Google turned 13 years old, the day a boy becomes a man, at least in Judaism. To celebrate the important birthday, Google has a special logo with a cake, birthday hats, and looking like an old fashion child’s birthday party setting.

Historically, there was some confusion as to when Google was born. Was it September 14th of the 27th? For years now, Google has settled on it being the 27th. Here is a look back at some of Google’s birthday logos:

Google’s 12th birthday logo:

Google’s 11th birthday logo:

Google’s 10th birthday logo:

Google’s 9th birthday logo:

Google’s 8th birthday logo:

Google’s 7th Birthday logo:

Google’s 6th Birthday logo:

Google’s 5th Birthday logo:

Google’s 4th Birthday logo: