luni, 12 august 2013

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Guy Builds an Anime Doll

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 12:48 PM PDT

One guy builds a soft vinyl anime robot doll that has big breasts and looks kind of sexy.






















One Armed MMA Fighter, Nick Newell

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 11:30 AM PDT

27-year-old Nick Newell is an American lightweight MMA fighter. Nick Newell is a one-armed fighter, with his left arm ending just after the elbow. As of August 2013 Newell remains undefeated.

















Via nicknewell.tv

Actors Then and Now

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 11:10 AM PDT

Let's see how they have changed.























































Google AdSense Newsletter - August 2013

bubbles
August 2013 Publisher ID ca-pub-1492172262972996

Dear publisher,

Since kicking off our 10th anniversary celebrations last month, we've also been hard at work to bring you new features. In this month's newsletter, we're highlighting several of these recent product updates. And if you missed some of the 10th anniversary festivities, it's not too late -- you can still replay the Hangout with Susan Wojcicki, join the Learn with Google Community, and catch up with the AdSense 10 Challenge. Other information you'll find in this newsletter:
  • Turn Analytics insights into AdSense opportunities
  • Improve your site's performance with the publisher scorecard
  • Access reports in your local time zone
  • Hear an AdSense success story
  • Stay informed with new in-account policy notifications
Regards,

Peter
The Google AdSense Team


Was this newsletter useful? Share your feedback with us.

Updates

Turn Analytics insights into AdSense opportunities

Google Analytics helps you understand your site performance, and now AdSense can help you use those insights to grow your site. Opt in to Analytics' new Account specialists setting under your Account Settings tab. Then we'll be able to send you targeted site tips, detailed traffic insights, and fresh ideas around using new features like Content Experiments to win moments that matter. You can find full instructions for updating your Analytics settings in the Analytics Help Center.



Improve your site's performance with the publisher scorecard

Have you checked out your scorecard yet? We want to continue improving AdSense so that you can focus on your content, and so we've launched the scorecard to give you better insights into your site's performance. You can see how your site compares to other publishers across a number of categories, and review specific suggestions for improvement.

Read more about the scorecard on our blog and check out the scorecard next time you log in to your account.



Access reports in your local time zone

Local time zone reporting is now available in your AdSense account. Until now, we've reported your daily earnings based on Pacific Standard Time (PST) but going forward, you'll be able to view them based on your local time zone. You can update your time zone preferences in a few simple steps directly from your account.

Case Study

Hear an AdSense success story

Jennifer Moss is the founder of BabyNames.com, a site that helps users pick the perfect baby name. She signed up for AdSense in 2003 to pay her hosting bills, but the revenue soon enabled her to work on the site full time and start a successful family business. Hear more of Jennifer's AdSense story and don't forget to share your own!


Program Policies

Stay informed with new in-account policy notifications

Remaining compliant with our AdSense program policies is essential for every publisher. To help you quickly understand and address any potential policy issues in your account, we'll be gradually rolling out a new policy notifications feature directly in your AdSense account.

If our system detects a policy violation, you'll now receive a notification in your account in addition to an email. You can also find more details and steps to resolve the violation under the Policy violations section on the Home tab.


Find out about our different support options.

More about AdSense:

Inside AdSense Blog

AdSense Google+ Page

AdSense Forum

AdSense on YouTube


© 2013 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

Email Preferences: We sent you this email because you have indicated that you are willing to receive occasional AdSense newsletters. If you do not wish to receive such emails in the future, you can opt out by clicking here.

Seth's Blog : Q&A: Where is the free prize inside?

 

Q&A: Where is the free prize inside?

"Where do Purple Cows come from?"

Continuing in our series, Bob at Arnold Architectural Strategies asked a question that was similar to many: What's the free prize, why don't you talk about it more and how do I use it?

In Free Prize Inside, my sequel to Purple Cow, I point out: As marketers, our instinct is to believe that we have to make a product or service that flies faster, jumps higher, costs less, works infinitely better and is generally off the charts at doing what the product is supposed to do. We get our minds around one performance metric and decide that the one and only way we can be remarkable is to knock that metric out of the park. So, hammers have to hammer harder, speakers have to speak louder and cars have to accelerate faster.

Nonsense. This is a distraction from the reality of how humanity chooses, when they have a choice.

We almost never buy the item we buy because it excels at a certain announced metric. Almost no one drives the fastest car or chooses the most efficient credit card. No, we buy a story.

The story is the thing that the product also does. It's the other reason we buy something, and usually, the real reason. Simple example:

You have a seven-year old daughter. The last time she unexpectedly woke up after going to bed was three years ago. Of course, you're going to hire a babysitter and not leave her alone, but really, what are you hiring when you hire a babysitter? Is it her ability to do CPR, cook gourmet food or teach your little one French? Not if she shows up after the kid goes to bed.

No, you're hiring peace of mind. You're hiring the way it makes you feel to know that just in case, someone talented is standing by.

If her goal is to be a great babysitter, then, good performance doesn't involve honing her CPR skills or standing at the door, listening to your daughter breathe. Good performance is showing up a few minutes early, dressed appropriately, with an air of confidence. Good performance is sending a text every 90 minutes, if requested, to the neurotic parents. Good performance is leaving the kitchen cleaner than she found it.

It sounds obvious, but it's rarely done. It's frightening to build and stand for 'other' when everyone else is making slightly-above-average.

The free prize is the other metric, the thing we want to talk about, the job we hire your product to do when we hire a product like yours. That's what we tell a story about.

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498

 

A Better Bargain for Students

Here's What's Happening Here at the White House
 
 
 
 
 
 
  Featured 

A Better Bargain for Students

On Friday, President Obama signed into law the bipartisan compromise to keep student loan rates low. It will save a typical undergraduate student $1,500 over the life of his or her loans.

Click here to see more from the signing ceremony and find out what President Obama had to say.

President Barack Obama looks back towards a group of students before signing H.R. 1911, the "Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013," in the Oval Office, Aug. 9, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

 
 
  Top Stories

The President and First Lady Speak at the Disabled American Veterans National Convention

On Saturday, the President and First Lady spoke at the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) National Convention in Orlando, FL. Founded in September of 1920, the DAV celebrates 92 years of service to disabled veterans and their families with this three-day event.

READ MORE

Weekly Address: A Better Bargain for Responsible, Middle Class Homeowners

President Obama says that the housing market is starting to heal, and now it’s time to build on that progress by creating a better bargain for responsible, middle class homeowners. The President announced steps he will take to strengthen the housing market, and now Congress must act to help make homeownership a source of pride and middle class security for generations to come.

READ MORE

President Obama Holds a Press Conference

President Obama took questions from the White House Press Corps in the East Room of the White House, addressing a range of topics including the National Security Agency's role and reforms to intelligence gathering programs.

READ MORE

 

Did Someone Forward This to You? Sign Up for Email Updates

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com

Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111


Custom Segments to Increase Sales

Custom Segments to Increase Sales


Custom Segments to Increase Sales

Posted: 11 Aug 2013 07:16 PM PDT

Posted by CraigBradford

One of the things that I like most about Google Analytics is that it can be as simple or as complex as you like. Out of the box it's very easy to use. Without much experience, you can quickly see the basics, like the amount of traffic you receive as well as the medium and source of traffic. But: We have a problem. The problem is that that's where most people stop. Too many people are making bad decisions by looking at Google Analytics data from a 30,000-foot view. With a little more work you can reveal some quick insights that could reveal easy CRO wins. To demonstrate how, I'll cover a couple of advanced segments that I like to use and explain how to set each of them up using custom variables, event tracking, and filters. Advanced segments are a huge area; you can make almost unlimited variations, so I've just picked a few that will hopefully inspire you to create some advanced segments of your own (I'd love to hear about them in the comments).

Attribution

Before doing anything, it's important to have a data set that you can trust, and that starts with proper attribution. If you haven't already read Annie Cushing's blog post "Take Credit Where Credit's Due," I highly recommend it, as it goes into a lot more detail on attribution. The full video is also available on the Distilled store.

Attribution starts with ensuring the correct mediums and sources are getting credit for the sales and actions they generate. The opposite is also true: You don't want good channels getting diluted by cross-contamination of bad channels. By default, Google has the basics covered, as shown below.

But for some websites, that "(none)" category can make up a significant portion of your traffic. Referral traffic isn't great either, as it doesn't tell you about the "why" part. Was it a press release that drove a lot of that traffic? Or was it email?

Thankfully, we have the ability to do campaign tracking using URL parameters that can help make these mediums more useful. The medium that's usually impacted by this the most is email. By default, Google groups email into the referral bucket.

To avoid this, you can create a new "email" medium by tagging all links in emails with URL parameters. Explaining tagging in detail is out of the scope of this post, so I'm going to assume you know how to do it. If you don't, you can read up on how to track emails in this post.

#Protip: The most common objection people have to using URL tagging is that it creates ugly URLs for users. Here's a solution.

Let's assume I want to track the people that visit the Annie Cushing video I recommended. The URL might look something like this:

http://www.distilled.net/store/sl-bos-2013-cushing/?utm_source=moz.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=annie+cushing+video

Pretty horrible. But your users never need to see it, thanks to some HTML5 goodness. You put the link in some anchor text, such as click here. Then on that landing page you would add something like this:

  _gaq.push(function() {  window.history.pushState('','', 'some-page');  });  

This means after the Google Analytics code has fired and collected all the attribution data from the horrible-looking parameters, the URL will be changed to whatever you set in the quotes. In this case it would change the URL to:

http://www.distilled.net/store/sl-bos-2013-cushing/some-page

But it could be anything you like. See this blog post from Rob Ousbey on the topic.

The downside to this is if people then share or link to that page it will 404, so if you just want to chop off the parameters, just replace the "some page" part with a ‘#'. There's probably a better way to do this so that there's no #, but I'm not a developer so I settle for "good enough" on this kind of thing.

So, to be clear, the action here is to get all your attribution set up correctly. For lots of details on how to do that, see Annie's post. Doing so will allow you to do some proper CPA analysis for the various channels you use.

Tracking form errors

Regardless of how easy you make your checkout process, there will always be people that struggle with the forms, so we want to know how and where these people are having problems. If we manage that, we make more sales. There are solutions such as Clicktale that allow you to analyse the forms on your site, but they don't allow you to tie that together with other metrics from your GA, such as conversion rates. To do this, I want to use Google Analytics event tracking to create an event any time someone fails to do something correctly on any of the fields in the form. Events use the following format:

  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)  

In my case I want to set:

  • Category = Form Error
  • Action = Submit
  • Opt_label = A way to identify the field that caused the error, for example "Phone number" or "Post Code"

You then need to set this to fire only when there is a validation error on the page. A validation error is that annoying red text that appears when you mess something up on a form. From a technical point of view there are a couple of different ways this can be done, depending whether the form is validated on the client side via JavaScript or on the server side (in which case the page will be reloaded).

Server side

On the HTML that gets sent to the browser when an error occurs, you'll need to add the event tracking to the text that fires next to each of the fields. Doing it this way allows you to not only see users that had problems, but will also let you see specifically what fields people have the most trouble with. You can then slice and dice that data however you like in GA to find other things like browser OS, etc.

Client side

If the validation is being done on the client side using something like JavaScript, the same process needs to be used, but the events will need to be fired by the script that creates the errors.

  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'form error', 'submit', 'phone number']);  

Tracking email unsubscribers for content analysis

Most email management services will allow you to see stats like open rates, number of people unsubscribing, etc., but they don't give you many insights into why those people unsubscribed â€" which is what we really need to know. To help get some insights it can be useful to find out which content those people have read the most, as this could potentially let you see what kind of content your audience doesn't like. You could even go as far as looking at authors.

To do this, you'll need an email provider that lets you add some custom code to the unsubscribe page. At Distilled we use MailChimp, which I know has this feature, but I'm not sure about others. You can then use whatever method you like to bucket these users, you could add a custom variable or event tracking to your Google analytics code, like this:

  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'email', 'unsubscribed']);  

The advantage of events is you can use them with goals, which would allow you to track over time and set up alerts for spikes in unsubscription rates.

Once this is set up, you'll want to create an "unsubscribed" advanced segment in Google Analytics for the event name like that shown below in the example:

Once you have these people in a group, you can start to slice the data however you like to find trends among the people who don't want to be on your list anymore.

Logged in/out

Depending on the type of site you have, it may or may not make sense to create segments based on whether your users are logged in or out. For example, you may have a different checkout process if you're logged in. Wouldn't it be nice if you could see the difference between conversion rates between logged-in and logged-out users? Or compare the behaviors of logged-in users compared to logged-out users? Thankfully, this is pretty easy to do. In fact if you look at the source code of this page, you can see how. Do a search in the source code for "setCustomVar" and you'll see what I mean. You'll see one of a few options but they will all follow a format like this:

This sets a custom variable with "user-type" as "visitor." If you're logged in and a pro member, you might see "Pro." From a CRO perspective, the point in doing this is you can see how different groups of people act on the site and use that information to increase the conversion rate of each group. You'll typically find that logged-out users convert less, as they have extra steps in the process, but you can always optimize the registration process to make it as painless as possible. When possible, I'd always take the Amazon approach and leave people logged in as long as possible, and have their credit card details saved to allow for quick and painless payment.

Also, once you can track people that are logged in, you can create advanced segments for things like "logged in users that added an item to their cart but didn't buy." These are easy pickings; on the server side you can segment by these users and send them an email to remind them that they have items in their shopping cart that they are just one click away from buying.

Find the "whales"

Photo by Gerard Lacz

I got this idea from Avinash. You can read the full post here. The idea is that you create a segment of users that typically spend more than the average customer, hence the term "whale." This is also why it's a good idea to have your attribution tracking set up correctly from the start, as you need to know where those whales came from as well as how much they cost to acquire compared to the average customer.

To do this, segment by users that bought more than a certain number of items:

Image credit

Once you have this data, you can begin to focus on the other data that's available to you, such as the medium and source of those users, and double down on the best channels.

That's all for now, I hope you've found this useful and I'd love to hear some of the custom segments or interesting ways you use Google Analytics in the comments.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : Magic + Generosity = the brand crush

 

Magic + Generosity = the brand crush

A decade ago, I was walking through Union Square in New York. The farmer's market was on, and the place was jammed with early adopters. Fortunately, I was wearing a Google shirt, a rarity at the time, a gift from a gig I had done for them.

Across the way, a woman shouted, "Google! Do you work for Google? I love Google! Google is my best friend..." as she waltzed through the crowd toward me.

How many brands get a reaction like that?

Let me posit for a moment that most people aren't capable of loving a brand, not if we define love as a timeless, permanent state of emotion, connection and devotion. I do think, though, that people have crushes on brands all the time. And a crush can get a brand really far.

The first element of a crush is magic. When a product or service does something so unexpected, so inexplicable that we are in awe of what just happened, it feels magical. It might be the mystery of how a 1969 air-cooled Porsche made someone feel when being driven for the first (or hundredth) time. Or, more recently, it might be the surge that comes from connections found, the sort that Facebook used to deliver to new users all the time.

Sometimes that magic is almost Jungian--the roar of the crowd, the smell of flowers on your wedding day, the look in a student's eyes when she hears she got into Princeton. Other times the magic is literally that, the magic of Arthur C. Clarke and any sufficiently advanced technology (the sort of magic that woman in Union Square felt in 2002).

Remember back to the first time you saw an iPhone or tasted a warm donut--these are leaps in experience that connect us to a feeling of wonder we don't often experience, one that (sadly) decays over time.

The second element? Generosity. When the wizard happily shares his potion, when the device or the service is affordable, sold for less than it's worth. Not necessarily free—Harley Davidson motorcycles were never free, but the magic of being accepted by a generous tribe was more than enough to overcome the price of entry.

In software, particularly online, generosity comes naturally. Not only does Google find you what you seek, not only does Twitter let you broadcast to your world, but they appear to do it at no charge at all. Magic and generous at the same time.

It's difficult for the day laborer, the replaceable freelancer, the commodity supplier to earn a crush, because they are cogs in the system... selling the expected, for a fair price. We complete our transaction with you and then move on, even steven.

The crush, in contrast, goes far beyond delivering what's expected. The crush builds value for both sides, delivering a quantum leap in the urgency of the interactions. Ask David Cassidy...

Here's where the famous, "don't be evil" mantra kicks in. When it was first uttered at Google, it meant, "don't be like Microsoft was." In particular in meant, "don't use the magic we're creating in one place to allow us to be ungenerous, and in particular, don't use our magic in one place to eliminate choice in others." When Microsoft used the hegemony of the Windows OS to force people to use IE, they were being 'evil'. They traded their magic and stopped being generous.

Crushes don't last forever. You need to keep adding magic and generosity.

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498