Say Hello to your new friend Google Fusion Tables.

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.
• Login to Fusion Tables http://tables.googlelabs.com.
• 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

Fusion Tables – The World is Yours…

As well as being able to visualise your web sites visitors on google maps, you can create scatter charts, motion charts, time-lines and more in Fusion. The sky is the limit – you can fuse multiple sets of data, use filters and aggregate tools for more selective visualizations, import data sets up to 100 MB, and collaborate with other researchers (geeks). With this being a pre alpha release – I’m really excited to see what the developer team roll out in the future – this could be another smash for Google – a plug n play business intelligence tool for the enterprise.

Ask any questions you may have in the comments…would love to know how you visualise your websites data…

Update: This post was nominated for a Semmys! http://www.semmys.org/2010/analytics-all-2010-nominees/

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….

1. Use CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks) for user generated content, media files, js frameworks etc.
2. Reduce the number of HTTP requests
3. Put CSS at the top of your document
4. Combine Multiple CSS files into One
5. Gzip Compress all your external files (can reduce upto 70% of response size – big win).

I recommend downloading both Page Speed & YSlow to any serious web entrepreneur – every second counts….

Fast response times foster higher flow states (Skadberg & Kimmel
2004), higher conversion rates (Akamai 2007), higher perceived
trustworthiness (Nielsen 1999) – Andrew King.