Monthly Archives: November 2013

Congratulations to North Sydney, Australia’s eTown of 2013

Earlier this year we announced the eTowns across Australia whose small businesses are making best use of the web to attract customers and grow revenue. Today we crowned North Sydney as the region whose web-savvy small businesses are outpacing the others. At an event at North Sydney business FORM+DESIGN, we were joined by Treasurer Joe Hockey and North Sydney Council representative Martin Ellis to hear about the innovative things North Sydney businesses are doing to lead the pack and stand out from one of the world’s biggest CBD’s right on their doorstep. For example, 20 years ago FORM+DESIGN’s customers were limited to the fifty thousand residents who lived close enough to walk into their store. Now, using online marketing to reach people who are looking for homewares, their customers come from as far afield as Melbourne, Perth, New Caledonia, Germany and Sweden. Something we were particularly excited to share on during the day is that in 2014 Google is committed to training more that 2,000 people to become web experts; experts that can then reach approximately 250,000 small businesses to help them become web enabled and take their revenue to the next level. From Holdfast Bay in South Australia to Launceston in Tasmania, small businesses across the country are growing their business with online marketing and social media—with good reason. Simply put, the web is rocket fuel to small business. Research shows that those that make the most of the online tools are two times more likely to be growing revenue, and four times more likely to be hiring.Inspired by the example of North Sydney and FORM+DESIGN, we hope to see many more regions and small businesses across Australia realise the potential of the web to grow their business, create jobs, and contribute to Australia’s economy. Small businesses employ over five million people or almost half of Australia’s jobs, and generate a third of our economic activity, so the growth that the web can bring to these businesses is a big deal. Small businesses who are yet to take the web plunge can take the first step on their online journey by setting up their own free Google+ page to help connect with customers on Google Search, Maps, and Google+.

Posted by Richard Flanagan, Head of Small & Medium Business Marketing - Australia & NZ

Full Customer Journey: Three Lenses of Measurement

My son is a LEGO enthusiast, and even though I don’t build that often, I am usually involved in the acquisition process of LEGO sets or digital goods. To quote a few, we build with bricks, plan with their software, play with their apps, buy through their website and consume content on their social profiles. Quite a lot of touch points with their brand, and that’s not all!

On my side, I get very curious on how they measure and optimize their customer experiences, so I like to use them as an example of how challenging the measurement world has become. And the way we look at this challenge at Google is through three lenses of measurement:
  1. Holistic Measurement: how can we understand our customers using multiple devices through multiple touch points? 
  2. Full Credit Measurement: how can we attribute the credit of bringing new and returning customers to marketing campaigns?
  3. Active Measurement: how can we make sure that data is accessible, accurate and comprehensive?
This is the kind of challenge that we try to solve for and that drives our thinking. Paul Muret, VP Engineering at Google, discussed these three challenges in his article on the Harvard Business Review and how we should face them. Here is an excerpt:
This is creating tremendous opportunities for business teams to engage customers throughout their new and more complex buying journeys. But before you can take advantage, you have to understand that journey by measuring and analyzing the data in new ways that value these moments appropriately. The payoff is better alignment between marketing messages and consumers’ intent during their paths to purchase - and ultimately, better business results.
Below is a presentation delivered by me at Dublin, in a Google Think event earlier this year. I discuss each of the challenges in depth.




Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team

Jazz up your site or blog with the new Google Maps embed

Earlier today, we introduced a feature in the new Google Maps that enables you to embed a Google Map by copying and pasting an HTML snippet. Make sure you’re opted in, and then head over to Google Maps, click on the gear icon on the lower right, and give it a go.

Like the new Google Maps, embedded maps are now built for you. Your users can sign in to these maps to see relevant content, like their saved places from Google Maps. Conversely, they can also save a location from your embedded map for viewing on Google Maps for desktop or mobile.

To top it off, embedded maps are free of usage limits, so you don’t have to worry about quotas.

Finally, over the coming weeks we’ll be introducing a new ad experience we think is attractive for users of the new Google Maps embed. This new on-map design will allow relevant local businesses to connect with your users, similar to the ads you currently see in the new Google Maps and Google Maps for Mobile. As part of this release, we’ve also updated the Google Maps/Earth APIs Terms of Service to enable us to launch new APIs with advertising. Existing APIs and new APIs launched without advertising retain the requirement for Google to provide 90 days notice prior to including ads.

Happy embedding!

Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, Google Maps API

Enrolments now open at summer school for aspiring startup founders

Accounting, consultancy and laws firms have long had summer programs which help young people get a sense for what it would be like to pursue those career paths. But it hasn’t been easy for aspiring entrepreneurs to get a feel for what it’s like to do their first tech startup.


That’s why General Assembly and Google Australia have teamed up to offer Introduction to Startup Entrepreneurship, a free 8-week online summer school that will cover topics like how to develop an idea, design and branding, working with developers and marketing for startups. The program will also run weekly Google+ Hangouts to allow face-to-face interaction with course instructors.  


Ten of the participants who complete the program and have worked to develop their ideas will be selected by General Assembly to attend a two-day boot camp at Google Sydney in March to further their entrepreneurial skills.


We hope this program will encourage more young Australians to follow their entrepreneurial passions, and contribute to Australia’s economic growth in the process. Tech startups have the potential to contribute over $109 billion of GDP and add half a million jobs by 2033, but to unlock this potential, we need more Australians to get amongst it!


The course begins on January 6, 2014.  Click here to enrol now.


Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director for Google Australia

SUPERWEEK 2014: January 21-23, Hungary

The following is a guest post contributed by Zoltán Bánóczy, founder of AALL Ltd. and the SUPERWEEK Conference series.

In the fourth week of the New Year, many of us will enjoy the gorgeous view pictured below as the actual backdrop for one the year’s most exciting analytics conferences.  Speakers hailing from Jerusalem to Copenhagen to San Francisco to Ahmedabad promise to deliver insightful talks about a wide range of topics surrounding the modern digital industry.


The 3 day SUPERWEEK 2014 begins on January 21st, located on the beautiful mountaintop of Galyatető, at the highest-lying 4 star hotel in Hungary. Fly to Budapest easily from across Europe and rely on our shuttlebuses called SUPERBUS as an option for your package. Conference goers can expect advanced talks at the sessions, data based opinions shared during the panels, and Google Tag Manager deep dives - some say even deeper than the Mariana Trench. 

In his keynote, Avinash Kaushik will share a collection of strategies to help you ensure that the focus of your analytics effort is on taking action and not data regurgitation in a session titled: “Driving an Obsession with Actionable Analytics.“  Caleb Whitmore (Analytics Pros) will be providing a “hands-on” training and conference goers can complete the GAIQ exam right afterwards. Excitingly, we get the opportunity to ask Avinash about Life! - in his Q&A session entitled: “Search, Social, Analytics, Life: AMA (“ask me anything”)”. 

Speakers include industry thought leaders, Top Contributors to the AdWords forums and many Google Analytics Certified Partner companies - all from about 10 countries.


We’ll try to cover the latest of the industry: predictive analytics (Ravi Pathak, India), Universal Analytics & Google Tag Manager implementations (Yehoshua Coren - Israel, Doug Hall - UK, and Julien Coquet - France), PPC / display advertising (Jacob Kildebogaard - Denmark and Oliver Schiffers - Germany), A/B testing, privacy (Aurélie Pols - Spain) and even analytics expert  “The Professor”, Phil Pearce from the UK.

Join us for the emblematic, traditional evening with campfire made from large 2+ meter logs where a wide range of (mulled) wine and mellow mood will be served.

Keep up to date on the agenda and other programmes by following us at @superweek2014 (or #spwk during the event) on Twitter.

Posted by Zoltán Bánóczy, Google Analytics Certified Partner

New sign-in page for Google Apps customers (coming next year)

Early next year, the sign-in page for all Google Apps customers will be updated to be consistent across all Google Apps services. In other words, the sign-in page for Gmail will now be identical to the sign-in page for Google Calendar, Google Drive, or any other Google Apps service. This change will improve security and make it easier for users to switch between accounts. This means a few things for your organization:

  • The Google Apps sign-in page can no longer be personalized with colors and custom logos. It will now look the same across all Google sign-in pages.
  • Users will have to log in with their full email address (example: [email protected])
  • For SSO domains with a network mask, users will be presented with the new Google sign-in page when they log in from outside the SSO network mask. This change does not affect SSO domains without a network mask.  

We will be providing more details in the next few months so you can properly communicate this change to your end users. Stay tuned.

Editions included: 
Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government

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Intuit Team Crunches its Own Numbers with Google Analytics Premium

Intuit products like Quicken and TurboTax have been putting the power of numbers in the hands of users since 1983.

Which is why we're so pleased that when Intuit wanted to boost the power of analytics for one of their own teams recently, they turned to Google Analytics Premium. The details are in our new case study, which you'll find here.

The study has the full story of Intuit's Channel Marketing Team, which now uses Google Analytics Premium to measure data for multiple business segments. Once they began using it, Intuit discovered that they had been under-reporting the success of their SEO traffic by at least 27% and conversions by up to 200%.  

Those are exactly the kind of vital numbers that Google Analytics Premium is designed to provide.  

Intuit used Blast Analytics and Marketing, a Google Analytics certified partner, to build out their solution, which was configured to match Intuit's own organizational structure. That structure helped Intuit "democratize" its data so that now anyone on the team can get what they need right away, in real time. Instead of the two days it used to take to request and deliver reports, it takes two hours or less.

Simply put, Ken Wach, Vice President of Marketing at Intuit said, “Google Analytics Premium increased the speed and accuracy of actionable data that drives our business.” 


Post by Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

Announcing Reviews in Google Places for Business

People come to Google to search for information about local shops and restaurants so they can make the best plans and purchases. That’s why as a business owner, you want to make sure you put your best foot forward online. With a quick search, locals -- or even people new in town -- can read reviews from your regulars to find the right place for a romantic dinner, a prize-winning turkey, or the perfect (last-minute) present for Mom.



Today, we’re introducing Reviews in Google Places for Business. Now you can learn what your customers are saying about your business on Google and across the web, in one place. If you have a verified business listing, you will now see your customer ratings and reviews in the easy-to-use review inbox.

Read and respond to customer reviews in the reviews inbox

Easily respond to customer reviews
Reviews also allows you to start a conversation with your customers by directly responding to comments left by users on Google. Are your customers happy with your service? Thank them for the kind words so they recommend you to their friends. Do they mention some areas for improvement? Ask them for suggestions so they visit you again.

And if you feel your business deserves more good reviews, or if you are missing feedback on your work, all you need to do now is to encourage your customers to post reviews on your Google+ page.

Business owners using the new Places for Business interface can now find the Reviews tab when they log into their dashboard as usual.

Not verified yet? Seize the moment and get started now at www.google.com/places.

Posted by Qasar Younis, Senior Product Manager

Success with DS series: Advanced features in executive reporting

This is the third post in our "Success with DS" series, highlighting tips and tricks around key DoubleClick Search features. Today’s submission is from Stephanie Bean -- DoubleClick Search Technical Product Specialist, and highlights some of the advanced capabilities of our newest launch -- executive reporting. 

We recently launched executive reporting -- a powerful new way to create custom visual reports to analyze data and share with your end clients, teammates and managers. As you sit down for a slice of pumpkin pie for the holidays, consider whipping together some useful pie, line and bar charts!

Executive reporting offers a number of advanced features that make holistic campaign reporting and analysis even more powerful. Today we’ll talk about two of them: downloading data and merging objects.

Download and share reports easily: 
Let’s say your management team is requesting a monthly report to understand how campaigns are performing, but they want something they can decipher at a glance, not a spreadsheet full of numbers. What should you do? This is a great use case for executive reporting. You can segment and visualize the data as needed in the DoubleClick Search UI, download the report, and quickly share it with management.

Tip: Reports can be downloaded as Microsoft Excel, but don’t forget about the option of saving or printing as PDF!



Merge objects to see trends across campaigns: 
While executive reporting includes all your search-based metrics, including engine stats, Google Analytics metrics, Floodlight columns, formula columns, and labels, we understand that you may want to analyze them across different lines of business within a single chart. Perhaps management wants to see how brand vs. non-brand terms are performing across your retail business. When multiple advertisers are included in one report, executive reporting identifies objects with the exact same name, such as Floodlight columns and labels, and merges them.

Tip: To take advantage of opportunities with merging, consider implementing a consistent naming convention for your labels across advertiser accounts.

Happy reporting!

Fab Friday is Catching Up

Author Photo
Hi everyone! Fab Friday is back. We went into a long hiatus since the last post back in October. A lot has been happening in the last few weeks, so I thought I’d jump back on and let you know about it all. We launched:


We also sunsetted the Google Maps API v2, our venerable Maps platform, and helped people migrate to v3.

And finally, Fab Friday isn’t complete without a video. This week we’ve got Mapping Big Data with Google's Cloud Platform, with Francesc Campoy Flores and Kurt Schwehr. Take a look:

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend, and happy mapping!

Posted by Mano Marks, Maps Developer Relations team