Presenting your monthly SEO campaign results to the Board at the end of the week?
In need of some killer data visualisations to break up the excel charts and make your audience super excited about their companies search marketing campaigns?
Fusion tables released in pre alpha earlier this month lets you import your own data sets. Its an experimental system for data management in the cloud. Google’s answer to Amazons EC2/public data sets. It’s a handy tool for search professionals to help create interactive visualisations of web traffic. Lets view our analytics “map data” like never before…
Exporting Map Data into Fusion Tables
Login to your analytics account and select the account you want to visualise.
On the dashboard you should see “Map Overlay” (depending on how you have account setup).
At the footer of the “Map Overlay” page click the “show rows” drop down and select “500″.
Scroll to the top of the page and hit “Export” selecting .CSV.
Choose “New Table” & Select the .CSV file you exported from your Analytics account.
Identify the header row (usually row 9) “Country/Territory + Visits” etc.
Name your Data Set and click “Finish”.
Hit up “Visualise” on the top navigation and select “Maps”.
Example Fusion Tables Analytics Map – US States Visitor Traffic
That’s it you’re saying? Well no… did I mention this is an interactive map that your audience can click on and view all the important data – conversion rates, per visit goal value, average time on site etc. Having this data to play with instead of just presenting it makes it a lot more real for your audience (it can help your job of increasing search spend organic/paid a whole lot easier).
Example Fusion Tables Analytics Map Showing Visits, Page Views, Time on Site etc
If you work as as an Search Engine Optimiser (SEO) chances are that you use Firefox as your main Browser (2nd - Chrome for quick research assignments/social networking, 3rd – Internet Explorer for backwards compatibility browser testing).
As we all know the power of a great application lies in it’s ability to be fully customisable and extended to however the user requires – Firefox doesn’t disappoint here. For SEO’s those extended requirements are to be able to see key information about clients, competitors websites – there is no other browser on the market that comes close to be able to review/research sites, links, code etc for SEO’s. FireFox is the browser of choice for the professionals in the industry.
A couple of days a go Mozilla introduced Add-on collections. Add on collections are a way to share your favourite plugins with the community and help highlight the best extensions out there…
Watch this cool introduction video on how to browse, create, install collections.
Google launched a new tool today that will be of interest to UX geeks – Page Speed. It is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on that produces immediate suggestions on how you can supercharge your web pages to improve their speed. The tool is very similar to Yahoo’s YSlow which is also Firebug addon.
Page Load is an important element of user experience and “SEO”. We all know Big G loves fast loading websites and will rank them higher in the SERPS. This tool is definitly worth checking out to get some extra ideas on how to improve your speed (apart from better web hosting).
A few tips for faster loading websites from past experience….
Wolfram Alpha the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone became Conscious this Weekend.
Having played around with it for a couple of hours now I have to say I am very impressed. Wolfram is no Google killer as the press built it upto be pre launch – it’s more of an additional/complimentary service to your everyday search engine (Google, Yahoo, Live etc).
Wolfram Alpha Technology
Wolfram Alpha is built on top of Mathmatica a computational software program created by British physicist Stephen Wolfram. It is written in 5 million lines of code (using webMathematica and gridMathematica) runs on 10,000 CPUs, contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains.
Wolfram Alpha is No Cuil!
Unlike the ill fated search engine Cuil that released July last year – Wolfram Alpha is definitely here to stay. My initial thoughts are that Google will inevitably look to partner with/purchase Wolfram Alpha. If Wolfram Alpha wanted to stay independent and open their search engine to the mainstream (it currently caters for academics & researchers) they could purchase a search engine off the shelf – Ask.com, Cuil.com? and potentially compete with Google themselves.
If you have been reading my tweets recently you will see I have been linking out to a number of useful GreaseMonkey Scripts that help improve Google Analytics in various ways – improved social media metrics, improved keyword trends etc.
For those of you that don’t know what Greasemonkey is – in short it’s a FireFox plug-in that allows you to customize the way a web page displays using small bits of JavaScript.
One of the first things I do in the morning while having breakfast is review my clients analytics data – From conversions to search traffic to goals and paid keywords effectiveness etc.
Over time I have discovered some essential Greasemonkey scripts for Google Analytics that have helped me “go deeper” into the data – listed below are my top five…
Reminds me of one of my submits on Digg that generated over 350 comments – half of them were based on my epic punctuational error!
Awesome web comic via the genius that is the Dog House Diaries. If you are on Digg feel free to add me over there http://digg.com/users/Zen53 and send me your submissions with or without spelling mistakes ;D
This is a mind map I put together awhile back for a music gathering, tagging, organising, playing, sharing music strategy. Over the past few weeks my laptop has been working overtime crunching audio keys,BPM’s etc. Using iTunes to attach keywords to the tracks (genre, feeling, key etc) – I’m building up a system for a real-time music mashup system which can produce mixes based on emotion, speed, genre.
If I have missed anything you feel would be beneficial to include i.e: cool recommendation engines – shoot me an email or leave a comment.
