Google

Every customer journey is different — a customer may see your display or video ads, receive an email, and then click through to your site from a search ad or organic search listing. Often, viewing display ads can attract your clients’ interest in your product and brand even if no click occurs. Traditionally, measurement technology separated out impressions or “view throughs” from clicks, but this separation missed out on valuable data on the impact of display advertising. Thanks to our integration with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Analytics can now break down the separation between clicks and impressions and give a more complete view of the customer journey. When a user views display ads on the GDN, or video ads on YouTube, and later visits your website and converts, these interactions with your brand can now be captured in Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reporting. GDN Impression Reporting is now available through limited whitelist. You can sign-up through this form to participate. Please note that we cannot guarantee access, but we will do our best to provide this feature to as many users as possible. Please also note that this data will only surface in the Multi-channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics. For more information on how to enable the feature in GA please see our help center article. Read on below for more tips on how to make the most of this new feature. How does Display fit on the conversion path? By enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics, you can learn how your display impressions assist your conversions. In the Multi-Channel Funnels Overview Report you will see two additional conversion metrics. Impression Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversion paths were touched by a display impression. Rich Media Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversions had a rich media interaction on the path to conversion. Rich media interactions are user interaction with YouTube or rich media ad formats, such as ad expansion, video control (such as play, pause, and resume), or switching a video ad to full screen. With the new Interaction Type selector you can now immediately filter your reports based how your users interacted with your marketing. Select Impression to see conversion paths from customers who saw your GDN display ads but did not click on them. Add Direct to the mix, to see who saw an ad and then visited your site directly to convert on a relevant transaction or Goal. If you want to focus on Rich Media interactions, you can select this interaction type to see how your users convert after interacting with your rich media and YouTube ads. How do I quantify the impact of display on the conversion path? In the Multi-Channel Funnels Top Conversion Path report you can see two new path elements, which indicate the presence of a display interaction. The “eye” symbol indicates a pure display impression from a non-interactive display image. This means a user has been exposed to your display ad on the journey to conversion, without clicking on it. The “movie” symbol indicates a user has interacted with one of your Rich Media ads, such as a YouTube video ad. Now you can see how many conversion paths, and how much associated value, has been driven through paths which benefited from a display impression or rich media interactions. To better quantify your brand targeted display efforts, consider breaking out these campaigns using custom channel grouping. Assigning partial credit to valuable display interaction touchpoints You can use the custom model builder from the Attribution Modeling tool to assign partial credit to these display events. Consider giving these events on the user’s conversion path more credit, and compare this against your baseline model. We also added a new set of dimensions to help you define valuable custom segments for your analysis. Want to see how many users are watching your True

We’d like to recognize and congratulate the 84 recipients and finalists of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and Google Scholarship for Students with Disabilities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The full list of the 2013 scholars and finalists and the universities they attend can be found in this PDF. Both scholarships aim to encourage underrepresented students to enter the computing field. The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honours the memory of Dr. Anita Borg who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing; we recently announced the U.S. recipients of this scholarship. The Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities aims to help dismantle barriers for students with disabilities as well as encourage them to excel in their studies and become active role models and leaders in creating technology. All of the students receiving the scholarships are pursuing degrees in computer science or related fields at universities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This summer, they’ll attend the annual Google EMEA Scholarships Retreat in Zurich, where they’ll have the opportunity to attend tech talks on Google products, participate in developmental sessions, network with Googlers and attend social activities. Notable speakers at the 2013 retreat include Alan Eustace, SVP of Knowledge, Megan Smith, VP of Google [x], and Carolyn Casey, Founder of Kanchi.org. Applications for the scholarships will be open again in just a few short months. Learn more about how the scholarships impacted the lives of previous recipients: For more information on all of our scholarships and programs, please visit the Google Students site. Posted by Efrat Aghassy, EMEA scholarships program manager

Are you a fan of McAfee Antivirus? Judging from this video put out by the actual John McAfee I sense that the company's founder is not a fan. As the oddball makes clear; he's had nothing do with the company for 15 years but still gets hounded about it. I understand his frustration but this is still a very odd video to put out. It's not safe for work, either, due to swearing, guns, and hired lady help. [ This post from Andrew Girdwood's blog contains only his personal opinions. ]

While meandering the streets of Paris, Paul Krugman apparently awakened to the fact that the assignment of claims to wealth through patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property is a really big deal. This is good news for those who have been jumping up and down yelling about this fact for the last 15 years or so. There is really big money in this area. Just to take my favorite one, we spend $340 billion a year on drugs, more than 2 percent of GDP ($295 billion on prescription drugs, $45 billion on non-prescription drugs). We would probably spend about one-tenth this amount in the absence of patent protection. The difference is equal to about 20 percent of after-tax corporate profits. And this huge gap between price and marginal cost gives drug companies enormous incentive to push their drugs as much as possible. This means concealing evidence that they are ineffective or even harmful. We routinely see stories about the drug companies responding exactly as economic theory predicts. Of course the huge gap between price and marginal cost leads to all the predicted distortions on the consumer side as well. People have to struggle to find the money to pay for drugs that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a prescription when the price would be largely a non-issue if they sold for the generic price. In the case of the tech sector, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung compete at least as much in their legal departments as in the quality of the products they develop. Patents are more often used to harass competitors than to protect innovation -- and that is what the business press says. In the realm of copyright, we have the efforts by the entertainment industry to turn as all into junior copyright cops through measures like SOPA or PIPA. So intellecutal property is a really big deal in the modern economy. And what is neat about it is that these property relations are almost infinitely malleable. (Okay, all property relations are malleable, but IP seems to offer much more room.) That's the key point that we all have to understand because the bad guys want to convince us that patents and copyrights came to us from on high and that it is our obligation to enforce them in their current or strengthened form, otherwise we are dirty communists. It's great to see that Krugman may now be on the case. Perhaps he will be able to teach the economists a bit of economics. (Hint: an intro textbook goes far here. Large gaps between price and marginal cost are bad in trade, much larger gaps between price and marginal cost are really bad when it comes to intellectual property.)

Google announced some Google+ changes last week but some of them were rolled out gradually and I couldn't see them. The Google+ notifications button looks different: it's now a bell. The number of new messages is more subtle and looks like iOS badges. The new notifications tray separates the messages you've read from the messages you haven't read yet. There's a new button that lets you "mark all as read" and a funny message: "All caught up!". Thumbnails are bigger and you'll sometimes see 4 of them for each message. The notifications tray now supports infinite scrolling, so you can read all your messages. One thing that's missing is the support for keyboard shortcuts: they were really useful.These aren't all the changes: "When you read a notification on one device, we'll mark it as read on your other devices. Likewise, dismissing a notification (with a swipe or a click) does so everywhere, so you can say goodbye to annoying repeats."Just in case you want to see the old interface for notifications, here are some screenshots:{ Thanks, Garfield. }

Folks at Google get cold-call emails out of the blue just like everybody else. Here’s an email that a colleague of mine got recently: I was on your website www.google.com and wanted to shoot you a quick note. I think I can make a few changes (aesthetically and/or SEO – wise) to make your site convert more visitors into leads and to get it placed higher in the organic search results, for a few of the select terms. This is NOT like one of those foreign emails you probably get in your inbox every day. Just to be upfront I have 3 agents that work with me for development /SEO. I would just need to know which (if not both) services you’re open to checking out information about, either web design or SEO. Would you be open to seeing more brief info / quote for what I would like to accomplish? Regards, XXXXXX XXXXX So this person is offering help to convert Google visitors into leads. Or, you know, to improve Google’s rankings in organic search results. Sigh. Earlier this week, I got a different email that said I would like to extend our knowledge to your audience in the form of a uest post [sic]. This post will be written by a college educated writer fluent in English. To recap we will provide- - 100% original guest post with statical [sic] data and studies from professional writers. Here’s my rule of thumb: if someone sends you an email with an SEO offer out of the blue, be skeptical. For example, check out some other fun SEO emails that I’ve gotten in the past.

Google Now's images are beautiful, colorful, cheerful, minimalist and futuristic at the same time. Now you can see the full-size scenes in this Flickr set. They were uploaded by Brent Couchman, who created them. "Brent Couchman is an independent graphic designer based in sunny San Francisco, California. Originally hailing from the Lone Star State where he developed branding, packaging & illustration for Fossil, Brent moved to the Bay Area to work with Hatch design," mentions his site.{ via Marques Brownlee and Ade Oshineye. }

Google tests a new interface for the mobile Gmail web app. The toolbar that includes buttons for archiving messages, marking as unread or adding labels now floats above the message and it no longer has a fixed position.Here's the new interface that's currently tested (stock Android browser):And here's the regular interface (mobile Chrome):As you can see, the Gmail mobile site goes back to the roots. Back in 2009, Google added a similar bar to the mobile site: "We made extensive use of other browser functions too: for example, the floaty bar that lets you archive, delete or apply more actions is animated via CSS transformations and controlled in part with touch events (when you scroll the screen, it follows you)."

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were. Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great. On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense. As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time. Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

In Northern California where I live, summer is here, which means family vacations, kids’ camps, BBQs and hopefully some relaxation. But it also means back-to-school shopping is just around the corner. So in case you’re on the hunt for a laptop in addition to pens, paper, and stylish new outfits, your search just got a whole lot easier. Chromebooks—a fast, simple, secure laptop that won't break the bank—will now be carried in over 3 times more stores than before, or more than 6,600 stores around the world. In addition to Best Buy and Amazon.com, we’re excited to welcome several new retailers to the family. Starting today, Walmart will be making the newest Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive (SSD), available in approximately 2,800 stores across the U.S., for just $199. Look for Chromebooks coming to the laptop sections of a Walmart near you this summer. And beginning this weekend, Staples will bring a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung to every store in the U.S.—more than 1,500 in total. You can also purchase via Staples online, while businesses can purchase through the Staples Advantage B2B program. In the coming months select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry’s and TigerDirect locations will begin selling Chromebooks. In the 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, availability in national retailers continues to expand. In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well. We’re working hard to bring Chromebooks to even more countries later this year. Chromebooks make great computers for everyone in the family—and now you shouldn’t have to look very far to find one. Happy summer! Posted by David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing