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vineri, 8 noiembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Credit Boom in China Could Trigger Bigger Crisis Than 2008; Three Things China Wants, Eight Things China Needs
Expect Another Leap in Healthcare Costs; New Obamashock Rules: Obamacare Expanded to Cover Mental Health and Addiction
Establishment Survey: +204K Jobs, Household Survey: -735K Jobs; How Federal Layoffs Distorted the Picture

Credit Boom in China Could Trigger Bigger Crisis Than 2008; Three Things China Wants, Eight Things China Needs

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:17 PM PST

In case you think all is well with China and the Yuan will soon replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency, you may wish to reconsider.

Credit growth in China is expanding at a massive rate on nonviable projects, and that is the only reason China has been able to meet its growth targets.

Marc Faber believes China could spark a bigger crisis than in 2008.

An alarming credit boom in China could trigger a global financial crisis that would make the one in 2008 look mild by comparison, says old gloomy eyes, Marc Faber.

"If I am telling you that we had a credit crisis in 2008 because we had too much credit in the economy, then there is that much more credit as a percentage of the economy now," the author of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report told CNBC late Thursday. "So we are in a worse position than we were back then."

China, in particular, has seen credit as a percentage of the economy jump 50% in the last four and a half years, said Faber, the "fastest credit growth you can image in the whole of Asia."

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank strategist John-Paul Smith told clients on Wednesday that China's growth model continues to be based on "ever-expanding debt, which leaves the country and financial markets very vulnerable to any potential loss of from investors and lenders."

It Can't Be Done

I have been preaching a similar message as Faber for years, most recently on November 6, in It Can't Be Done.

Three Things China Wants

7.2% growth
No rise in unemployment
Strengthening of the ruling party.

Eight Things China Needs To Do

Cleanup its banking sector
Curtail rampant credit growth
Privatize State-Owned-Enterprises (SOEs)
Rein in monetary growth
Eliminate dependence on nonviable infrastructure projects as a means of growth
Writeoff bad debts
Float the renmimbi (yuan)
Undertake massive economic and political reforms

What China wants is impossible. And the longer China waits to do what needs to be done, the bigger the eventual crisis.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Expect Another Leap in Healthcare Costs; New Obamashock Rules: Obamacare Expanded to Cover Mental Health and Addiction

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 12:47 PM PST

If you are already stunned by rising Obamashock! healthcare costs, you can expect still more shocks thanks to new rules and expanded coverage for mental health and addiction programs.

A few snips from the New York Times article Rules to Require Equal Coverage for Mental Ills will explain.

The Obama administration on Friday will complete a generation-long effort to require insurers to cover care for mental health and addiction just like physical illnesses when it issues long-awaited regulations defining parity in benefits and treatment.

The rules, which will apply to almost all forms of insurance, will have far-reaching consequences for many Americans. In the White House, the regulations are also seen as critical to President Obama's program for curbing gun violence by addressing an issue on which there is bipartisan agreement: Making treatment more available to those with mental illness could reduce killings, including mass murders.

According to administration officials, the rule would ensure that health plans' co-payments, deductibles and limits on visits to health care providers are not more restrictive or less generous for mental health benefits than for medical and surgical benefits. Significantly, the regulations would clarify how parity applies to residential treatments and outpatient services, where much of the care for people with addictions or mental illnesses occurs.

Insurance companies have raised concerns about the expense involved in paying for the lengthy and intensive courses of treatment that the final regulations address. But experts have said the rules are not expected to significantly add to the cost of coverage because so few patients require these levels of care.

Former Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, a co-sponsor of the 2008 law, said the rules could particularly help veterans. "No one stands to gain more from true parity than the men and women who have served our country and now need treatment for the invisible wounds they have brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.

State insurance commissioners will apparently have the primary responsibility for seeing that commercial insurers comply with the parity standards. They already have their hands full, however, enforcing new insurance market rules, and in some states insurance regulators are considered close to the industry.

"We need enforcement," Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. "The notion of delegating this to the states, which are looking to the federal government for direction, is problematic."

Don't Worry "Experts" Say Costs Won't Rise "Significantly"

Note the slant by the NYT.

People want to curb gun violence and this will do it.
It will help veterans.
It won't cost much.

Supposedly costs won't rise much because few people demand mental health services. Well, watch what happens when you mandate expanded "free" services.

And if by some amazing miracle additional free services do not increase costs, it's important to note that a small percentage of people are responsible for huge portions of overall costs.

Cumulative Distribution of Personal Healthcare Spending

Facts and Figures

Top 1% Spend Over 20% of Total Costs
Top 5% Spend About 50% of Total Costs

Those numbers are from a 2012 study on the Concentration of Healthcare Spending by the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM).

Obamashock! Apology

Yesterday, the president made a quasi-apology for the holes and gaps in the law.

Link if video does not play: Exclusive: Obama personally apologizes for Americans losing health coverage

After the Non-Apology

CNN discuses Obamacare: After Obama's apology, talk of solutions and -- still -- the website

As the president expressed regret in an exclusive interview with NBC News on Thursday, there already were plans being developed in Congress to address the matter as well as steps the administration might take to resolve the issue without reopening the politically charged healthcare law legislatively.

Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said there is no specific plan at the moment when asked in Atlanta on Friday what the administration was considering.

One priority, she said, is to identify those customers as well as approaches for solutions.

"But there is no specific option right now," she said.

More on Obamashock!

My Personal Experience - Obamashock!

More Obamashock! Glitches Hit Paper, Phone Applications; Obamacare Glitch Great Quotes

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Establishment Survey: +204K Jobs, Household Survey: -735K Jobs; How Federal Layoffs Distorted the Picture

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 10:01 AM PST

Initial Reaction

The already wide discrepancies between the household survey and the establishment survey took a wild leap today.

The establishment survey showed a gain of 204,000 jobs but the household survey showed a drop in employment of -735,000. However, the BLS states that on unadjusted basis 448,000 of the drop in employment was due to temporary federal layoffs during the budget negotiations.

Because of the way the BLS calculates overall numbers, one cannot subtract the seasonally unadjusted number of -448,000 from the reported seasonally adjusted number of -735,000 and arrive at any kind of meaningful number.

Important Note: I will go through my normal calculations, but they are very distorted by the temporary layoffs.

How Federal Layoffs Distorted the Picture

The BLS reports "Estimates of the unemployed by reason, such as temporary layoff and job leavers, do not sum to the official seasonally adjusted measure of total unemployed because they are independently seasonally adjusted. Household survey data for federal workers are available only on a not seasonally adjusted basis. As a result, over-the-month changes in federal worker data series cannot be compared with seasonally adjusted over-the-month changes in total employed and unemployed."

From the Commissioner's Statement

Some federal workers who were not at work during the entire reference week in October were not classified as unemployed on temporary layoff.

Our review of the data indicates that most of these workers should have been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff. Such a misclassification is an example of nonsampling error and can occur when respondents misunderstand questions or interviewers record answers incorrectly. According to usual practice, the data from the household survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are taken to reassign survey responses.

If the federal workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been slightly, but not substantively, higher than reported.

Revisions

This was the fourth straight month of revisions to the establishment survey. The first two revisions were significantly lower. Last month, the revision was slightly higher and I commented "Perhaps the BLS has numbers they are happy with now." So much for that idea. Today, the BLS reports "August revised up by 45,000 (from +193,000 to +238,000), and the employment change for September revised up by 15,000 (from +148,000 to +163,000).

The unemployment rate rose 0.1 to 7.3% (but according to the BLS it should have been higher due to estimated nonsampling error as noted in the commissioner's statement above).

It's the household survey that determines the unemployment rate, not the establishment survey. So let's take a look at the factors.

Explaining the Unemployment Rate

Unemployment rate rose by 0.1 percentage points
Employment fell by 735,000
Those in the labor force fell by 720,000
The civilian population rose by 213,000.
The Participation Rate (The labor force as a percent of the civilian noninstitutional population) fell to 62.8%, smashing the previous low (tied last month) of 63.2% dating back to 1979.

Employment fell more than the labor force, so the unemployment rate rose.

October BLS Jobs Statistics at a Glance

Payrolls +204,000 - Establishment Survey
US Employment -735,000 - Household Survey
US Unemployment +17,000 - Household Survey
Involuntary Part-Time Work +124,000 - Household Survey
Voluntary Part-Time Work -181,000 - Household Survey
Baseline Unemployment Rate +0.1 to 7.3% - Household Survey
U-6 unemployment +0.2 to 13.8% - Household Survey
Civilian Labor Force -720,000 - Household Survey
Not in Labor Force +932,000 - Household Survey
Participation Rate -0.4 at 62.8 - Household Survey

Quick Notes About the Unemployment Rate

The unemployment rate varies in accordance with the Household Survey, not the reported headline jobs number, and not in accordance with the weekly claims data.
In the last year, those "not" in the labor force rose by 3,134,000
Over the course of the last year, the number of people employed rose by a mere 240,000 (an average of 20,000 a month)
In the last year the number of unemployed fell from 12,248,000 to 11,272,000 (a drop of 976,000)
Percentage of long-term unemployment (27 weeks or more) is 36.1%, a decrease of 0.8 from last month.
The mean duration of unemployment is 36.1 weeks, a decline of 0.8.
8,050,000 workers who are working part-time but want full-time work. A year ago there were 8,286,000. This is a volatile series.

October 2013 Jobs Report

Please consider the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) October 2013 Employment Report.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 204,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 7.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in leisure and hospitality, retail trade, professional and technical services, manufacturing, and health care.

Click on Any Chart in this Report to See a Sharper Image

Unemployment Rate - Seasonally Adjusted

Employment History Since January 2009

click on chart for sharper image

Change from Previous Month by Job Type

Hours and Wages

Average weekly hours of all private employees remained at 34.4 hours. Average weekly hours of all private service-providing employees was flat at 33.3 hours.

Average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory private workers rose $0.02 to $20.26. Average hourly earnings of private service-providing employees rose $0.02 to $20.04.

Real wages have been declining. Add in increases in state taxes and the average Joe has been hammered pretty badly. For 2013, one needs to factor in the increase in payroll taxes for Social Security.

For further discussion of income distribution, please see What's "Really" Behind Gross Inequalities In Income Distribution?

BLS Birth-Death Model Black Box

The BLS Birth/Death Model is an estimation by the BLS as to how many jobs the economy created that were not picked up in the payroll survey.

The Birth-Death numbers are not seasonally adjusted, while the reported headline number is. In the black box the BLS combines the two, coming up with a total.

The Birth Death number influences the overall totals, but the math is not as simple as it appears. Moreover, the effect is nowhere near as big as it might logically appear at first glance.

Do not add or subtract the Birth-Death numbers from the reported headline totals. It does not work that way.

Birth/Death assumptions are supposedly made according to estimates of where the BLS thinks we are in the economic cycle. Theory is one thing. Practice is clearly another as noted by numerous recent revisions.

Birth Death Model Adjustments For 2012

Birth Death Model Adjustments For 2013

Birth-Death Notes

Once again: Do NOT subtract the Birth-Death number from the reported headline number. That approach is statistically invalid.

In general, analysts attribute much more to birth-death numbers than they should. Except at economic turns, BLS Birth/Death errors are reasonably small.

For a discussion of how little birth-death numbers affect actual monthly reporting, please see BLS Birth/Death Model Yet Again.

Table 15 BLS Alternate Measures of Unemployment

click on chart for sharper image

Table A-15 is where one can find a better approximation of what the unemployment rate really is.

Notice I said "better" approximation not to be confused with "good" approximation.

The official unemployment rate is 7.3%. However, if you start counting all the people who want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.

U-6 is much higher at 13.8%. Both numbers would be way higher still, were it not for millions dropping out of the labor force over the past few years.

Labor Force Factors

Discouraged workers stop looking for jobs
People retire because they cannot find jobs
People go back to school hoping it will improve their chances of getting a job
People stay in school longer because they cannot find a job
Disability and disability fraud

Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be over 9%. In addition, there are 8,050,000 workers who are working part-time but want full-time work.

Grossly Distorted Statistics

Digging under the surface, much of the drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years is nothing but a statistical mirage coupled with a massive increase in part-time jobs starting in October 2012 as a result of Obamacare legislation.

Moreover, as noted above, this month's numbers are extremely distorted due to temporary layoffs. Next month we will have a better understanding of various factors including the unemployment rate.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

West Wing Week: "Casual, With a Raffish Look"

Featured

West Wing Week: "Casual, With a Raffish Look"

This week, the President worked to help consumers learn about and enroll in quality, affordable health insurance plans through the Marketplaces, welcomed Iraq's Prime Minister, hosted the Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks, and kicked off the newly re-instated White House Tours with a surprise drop-by.

Click here to watch this week's West Wing Week:

4 Conversations That Don't Involve Rank Reports - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 07 Nov 2013 03:18 PM PST

Posted by Dana DiTomaso

With personalization and (not provided) keywords, there's been plenty of debate in recent months over the value of keyword rankings in today's world of marketing. It's important to remember, though, that there are many ways of showing success without even mentioning keyword rankings.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Dana DiTomaso tells us about a few important conversations we can have regardless of our (or our clients') opinions on rank reports.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans. I'm not Rand today. I'm Dana DiTomaso from Kick Point, and I presented at MozCon about next-level local SEO tactics. One of the things that I talked about and one of the things people asked me about, I said, this was a little throwaway comment, "Don't have conversations with your clients that end in rank reports, because it ends up in a bad conversation, and it focuses on the wrong kind of metric." People at the party afterwards said to me, "That's nice, Dana, but seriously we have clients, and they want rank reports. So what are we supposed to do?"

So today I am doing a Whiteboard Friday on conversations with clients that don't end in a rank report, because I feel like this is a really important way for our industry to move. It's a really important conversation you need to learn how to have, and if you come armed with all this stuff, when you go meet with a client, eventually when you get to the end and you drag them through this process, they're going to love you forever. I promise. I promise. If it doesn't work, then I will send you Smarties, which are delicious chocolate treats from Canada. I promise, just e-mail me.

So we're going to start with things that we talk to clients about when we start working with them. The first thing is I say to them, "How much new business do you want?" Before they say to me, "Oh, I'm not showing up in the map, or I'm not ranking for these phrases," I say, "How much new business can your company take in, say, the next month?"

These are actually real numbers from one of our real clients. So this isn't me just making up some crap. So they said to me, "I can take 200 new customers." It's a service-based business. So they really do have an upper ceiling on how much new business they can take before they run out of people and they have to hire again. Okay, so 200.

Now I say, "So how many calls and people walking in," and it's a medical industry. It's not a lot of people who walk in, but they mostly get phone calls. How many new calls do they get now? They said, "Well, we track."
They're good at tracking. If your client isn't good at tracking, then get them good at tracking. Then they say, "Okay, we got a 148 calls now."

So I know that from the number of people who sign up with them, I say, "How many people who call actually make an appointment?" They say, "Well, it's about 80%." Okay, so that means that you have 118 new leads.

Okay, so you have 118 new leads that you get, and they look in their numbers and they say, "Yeah, that seems about right. That seems cool." So then I take a look at their website visits for the previous month, for the previous time period, unique, not all visitors, just unique visitors, and I say, "This is how many you unique visitors you got. It was 3,904. So that means that you have about a 3% conversion rate from the number of people who go to your website to the number of people who sign up for your stuff."

So now we have a number that we can work with. Then I say, "Okay, so if you want to hit 200 pieces of new business, that means that you have to get 250 calls or walk-ins"â€"perhaps another business, not this oneâ€""which means that you need to get 6,700 visits to your website."

So this is when we say, "Based on the amount of budget that you'd like to give with us, we don't recommend that you're going to hit this number in this first month." So then we can figure out a plan with them and say,
"Okay, so next month we're going to start with PPC. We're going to do some AdWords, because that's going to convert really well for you, and you really want to get new business in right away. So let's do some AdWords."

Then the next month, we're working on the map stuff in the meantime, and then we can create a plan for them on when we think we're going to hit these 6,700 visits, when we think that number's going to happen. Then they know how many months to expect of return.

Then we can also find out from them, "How much is each one of these 118 people worth to you? How much are you willing to spend per lead to get those people in the door?" Then you can also take the math and break that out and determine your ROI for your business. So if you charge them a certain amount each month, which is how we do it, it's a monthly retainer type project, then we know the exact ROI and the exact cost per lead. So we can say to the client, "Hey, we're actually making you money." Then they just keep paying the bills because we're actually making them money. We're not costing them any money.

The second part of this is what you report on. So how do you get to these 6,700 visits? We break out all of our reports into five channels. We say how much organic traffic you got, how much paid, how much referral, how much social, how much direct. We show them just the unique visitor counts, and then we try to break down the conversions, although not every website has strong conversions.

Sometimes we can't say, "Okay, you got X number of calls via social." We don't necessarily know that. If we have call tracking set up, we can tell some of that. But it's not foolproof, obviously, like maybe somebody came via your Facebook page, and then they bookmarked the site, and then they called later. So of course it's only going to reflect as a social visit, but whatever. So that's why these raw numbers are so important. You can't track everything, but you can try to track most of the things.

The other part of social, specifically, actually is a lot of really small businesses say, "Yeah, this social thing, I don't understand. It's boring, it's stupid, and only kids are on Facebook. My clients aren't on Facebook, and I don't need social." So we start reporting on social, and there's a really nice piece of regex that you can use to break out your social visits. Do not include them in the referral traffic. Make sure to break them out as their own separate channel.

Make sure that when you report on social, if you're getting a lot of social visits, just tell them about it and say, "Hey, I know you're not doing anything on social right now, but you're getting a lot of social traffic."
Or maybe if they're a home builder, for example, maybe they're getting Pinterest traffic, or from House.com, which is new house new social network. You say to them, "I know you're not on any of these places, but people are already coming to your website from it, and they're converting. So maybe we can put some effort in. Just imagine the amount of business that you would get." You say, "It would be this much extra each month for us to help you with your social strategies." This is a good business development tip for you.

Then the last thing that pulls all of this together, and this is another throwaway in my presentation, a lot of people say, "Well, advertising agencies, how do I work with these people?" Part of it is just helping them be better at their job and helping them show that what they're doing is actually making money.

So you don't want to go into a client and say, "That advertising company you're paying all that money to, that stuff is crap. Forget them. You've got to go with this SEO stuff instead." Then you make enemies instead of making friends.

So what we do is we say, "Tell us about all the advertising you're doing right now, all your print ads, all your radio. Who is doing it? How are you tracking it?" They'll say, "Well, we have a print ad in the local newspaper, and we do a radio ad on this radio station, which is right in with our demographic." 'I'll say, "That's great. What I would like to do is I would like to put some call tracking around that, so when you have the ad, and this is, 'We're awesome, you should call us, visit our awesomecompany.com, or call number,'" instead it would say, "Visit our awesomecompany.com/radio station name, or this magical call tracking number."

So people do call from radio. I know they're usually in their car, totally breaking the law that you're not supposed to use your cell phones. But they do call. If they visit the website, set up a landing page. It doesn't have to be like a crazy PPC landing page, where you rip out the navigation and everything else. Just a landing page that says, "Hey, radio station listener."

In our hometown we have Sonic, so if it's like our awesomecompany.com/sonic, that's like a new alternative rock station. So if they visit Sonic, then we know the type of listener who's coming, and then we can write the content in a way that makes sense to that listener. We know how the DJs are on that radio station, so we can match the tone of the content to match the tone of the person who probably came because they heard the ad on Sonic. We know you're not listening to classical. You're listening to Pearl Jam. So we know the kind of music that you like, what type of person that you are, and we can write that content for you. It says basically, "Howdy, Sonic listener, here's the stuff that we think you should know in order to call. Here's the information you want to arm yourself with. Hey, give us a call, or fill out this form." There's your conversion tactic there. So we can see how many visits we got to that web page.

Then what you do is you talk to your radio rep or your media buyer, or whoever else the client is working with, and you say, "Can I get the media blocking chart?" This tells you when the ad is running. If it's from the radio station, for example, they can tell you after it's been done or what hours it was played in. So maybe they decided to only run the ad from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., for example. Then in that case, you can take a look at your analytics on an hourly basis and compare: Did we get more direct and organic visitsâ€"this is typically the two that radio converts toâ€"during those times?

You can't tell with a direct visit if they didn't go to that fancy URL, if they just typed in the main URL, or if they organically typed in the name of your client and then went to the site. So maybe it's a brand new visit. More likely it's just not provided for this particular client, where these numbers in the example, they're actually up to 50% of not provided now, and I think it's just a lot of cell phone visits.

So we take a look at these metrics. We compare it to the hours in their media blocking chart, and then we know approximately how much benefit they're receiving as a result of radio. Then you look good, because you're able to take an offline piece of advertising and turn it into an online metric, that is a conversion metric for the client, and the radio station looks great, because, "Hey, look at this, now we actually know how much benefit you're getting from radio, which is a really difficult thing."

Then because the radio station likes you, radio station reps are actually super friendly. You should make friends with them. They usually have like free swags and stuff and tickets to things. But the other thing is that they work with a lot of small businesses who first turn to radio. They're not calling you, they're calling the radio station because they think radio works, and for some clients it does. It really depends.

But that radio rep will say, "Hey, do you have a website? We want to mention your website in the ad." The company will say, "No, I don't know about this web thing." The radio station will say, "I'm working with this amazing company, and they have done this great tracking for one of our other clients, and look at what they've done, and look at the stuff they can report on." They'll say, "That's amazing. I clearly need to spend all my money on these services, except for the money we're going to spend on radio." Then you get new business out of it.

Somebody asked on the last day, "How do you get a seat at the table with the advertisers?" It's by playing nice with them. It's by saying to them, "Look, I know that you can't do this level of tracking with the offline advertising to the actual leads, but I bet you can, and I'm going to teach you how. But I'm also going to show everything and how it relates to the client, all the pieces and how it all comes together." Then when you, as the business, as your consultant, when you report on this, that turns into this complete marketing reporting for the client, and they love this. They get really excited about it. Like when I give a client a report and I say, "Look at this, your cost per lead went down two bucks," that's really exciting for a client." They think, "Wow, this company is making even more money for me. What would happen if I gave them more money? Then what happens when I refer my friends to them to make more business?" It's a way to make a rapport that turns into a business building tactic for you.

I hope you find this helpful. Again, if you didn't, e-mail me and I'll give you some Smarties. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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New and Improved Custom Reports Added to Moz Analytics

Posted: 07 Nov 2013 03:31 AM PST

Posted by Miranda.Rensch

Hello everyone! Miranda here. I'm a Product Manager at Moz and I'm excited to announce that we've added custom, automated reporting to Moz Analytics. This is something that already existed in PRO (the predecessor to Moz Analytics), but the new version has some cool upgrades I'd like to point out, so here goes a quick walk-through.

Walk-through of the new custom reports

With the new version of custom reports, you can select (almost) any visualization or data list from within Moz Analytics to be included in a custom PDF and emailed regularly.

To access the new reports, just go into any campaign and click "Custom Reports" in the top right and then click "Create / Schedule Report" to get started.

Next, you'll begin filling in the details of your report. You can give it a name and a description to appear at the top of the PDF:

In the "Add Modules" step you use a left navigation similar to the normal Moz Analytics experience so you can quickly navigate to your favorite data / visualizations and click the + sign to select them. In the next step you'll be able to organize them and add notes.

In the "Design Report" step, you can re-order your modules, add notes, and if you have access to branded reports, add your brand logo to be printed on the PDF.

In the next step you can preview your report. Click "Generate PDF Report" to view and save as an actual PDF.

Finally, you can schedule the report to be emailed regularly to you and any others that you specify. You can now also customize the text of the email that gets sent out!

When you've finished setting up your report, you can see all active reports on the main Custom Reports page. From there you can see the next scheduled send date and edit your reports.

Other new stuff in Moz Analytics

While we're at it, we'd like to mention a few other improvements in Moz Analytics:

Crawl diagnostics updates

We made some improvements to the design to make it easier to find the issues exposed by our custom crawler. You can now see a breakdown of your top High, Medium, and Low priority issues at the bottom of the Crawl Diagnostics overview page.

You will also see the issue counts included in the issue drop-down.

We've also made sure that all of the crawl data is included in the .csv export. We are still working on making views of duplicate pages and titles visible outside of the .csv.

Keyword opportunities improvement

With this smaller update, we added a button to the keyword opportunities report in the rankings section, allowing you to quickly add an attractive keyword to your list for rank tracking.

Fresh Web Explorer alerts

In case you missed it, we also recently released a big update to Fresh Web Explorer that lets you create and save custom alerts. Use it to get prompt alerts when someone publishes content mentioning your brand, your competitors, or even discover interesting link and outreach opportunities. Cyrus even wrote a whole blog post about it.

What's next for Moz Analytics?

Here are some of the projects that are currently in-progress and up next for Moz Analytics. This is just the top of our list, but we'd love to know what you think! Please let us know in the comments or on our feature request forum.

Monthly timeframes: We are still working on adding monthly timeframe options into custom reports and the rest of the Moz Analytics app. We hope to have that in by the end of the year. Also, we are aware that there are some issues currently with monthly custom reports in PRO causing them to be delayed. We hope to build these monthly reports into the new version of custom reports in a more scalable way and we apologize for the issue in PRO.
Lots of bug / UX fixes: We're working on continually responding to feedback and bugs in the new application. We've gotten to many, but not all of them. Thank you for your patience!
Contextual help: We're working on ways to bring help guides and videos directly into the app so that when you need help you can find it quick.
Add individual keyword history to Custom Reports: There are a couple of modules that can't be added to custom reports yetâ€"Analyze a Keyword (individual keyword history), Grade a Page, and Analyze Page Issues. We hope to make those available in the next few months as well.
Per-page PDF downloads: We are currently working on allowing PDF downloads of any page in the app. We hope to have that done in the next month or so.
Customized timeframe options: We're in the process of researching our ability to provide more customized timeframe options. It's a bit complicated due to the variety of data we include in our app, but we're looking at our options.
Multi-user accounts: We're working on supporting multiple users per account.
You tell us! If you have any other feedback or ideas for how this software could be better and save you more time, please let us know on our feature request forum!

That's all! If you have any questions or comments, chances are other people will too, so why not ask it on the Moz Q&A forum! Looking forward to hearing your feedback. If you'd like to volunteer a half-hour to give more in-depth feedback about this section or reporting in general, please email miranda@moz.com.

Happy reporting!
Miranda Rensch
Product Manager @ Moz

Seth's Blog : Every presentation worth doing has just one purpose

Every presentation worth doing has just one purpose

To make a change happen.  

No change, no point. A presentation that doesn't seek to make change is a waste of time and energy.

Before you start working on your presentation, the two-part question to answer is, "who will be changed by this work, and what is the change I seek?  "

The answer can be dramatic, "I want this six million dollar project approved."  

More likely, it can be subtle, "I want Bob to respect me more than he does."

Most often, it's, "I want to start a process that leads to action."

  If all you're hoping for is to survive the ordeal, or to amuse and delight the crowd, then you're not making a presentation, you're merely an entertainer, or worse, wasting people's time.  

Change, of course, opens doors, it creates possibilities and it's fraught with danger and apparent risk.   Much easier to deny this than it is to embrace it.

Every element of your presentation (the room, the attendees, the length, the tone) exists for just one reason: to make it more likely that you will achieve the change you seek. If it doesn't do that, replace it with something that does.

And of course, you can't change everyone the same way at the same time. One more reason to carefully curate your audience with your intent in mind.

If you fail to make change, you've failed. If you do make change, you've opened the possibility you'll be responsible for a bad decision or part of a project that doesn't work. No wonder it's frightening and far easier to just do a lousy presentation.

But you won't. Because the change matters.

• Email to a friend •

joi, 7 noiembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Czech Republic Enters Currency Debasement Club; Koruna Intervention Triggers Record Drop; "Hardball" in Pictures
Euro Swings Significantly, Gold Dips Following ECB Rate Cut Announcement; US Tapering Coming Up?
ECB Unexpectedly Cuts Rate to .25%; Draghi Promises Loose Policy for "Extended Period", "Ready to Consider All Instruments"; What Debasement is Next?

Czech Republic Enters Currency Debasement Club; Koruna Intervention Triggers Record Drop; "Hardball" in Pictures

Posted: 07 Nov 2013 05:23 PM PST

Currency madness has spread to the Czech Republic. Central bank intervention triggered a record plunge in the Koruna vs. the Euro.

Bloomberg reports Czechs Play Koruna Hardball as Intervention Triggers Record Drop

The Czech central bank's return to currency interventions after 11 years heralds a push for a weaker koruna to ward off deflation and kick-start the economy.

The koruna plunged 4.4 percent to 26.982 against the euro yesterday, its biggest-ever drop and the most in the world on the day, after the central bank sold the currency in the foreign-exchange market. Governor Miroslav Singer pledged to keep intervening "for as long as needed" to spur inflation, setting a target of "near" 27 per euro, a level the koruna last traded at in 2009.

"The central bank signaled willingness to play hardball in its foreign-exchange policy," Luis Costa, an emerging-market strategist at Citigroup Inc., said by e-mail from London. "For the moment, I believe the 'ideal level of 27' will be met."

Unlike interventions aimed at strengthening the exchange rate, which require sales of foreign currencies that can deplete foreign reserves, the Czech central bank is printing more koruna to drive down its value. The money supply increase may lead to the higher inflation rates that Singer is pursuing.

"The power is unlimited," Guillaume Tresca, a Paris-based strategist at Credit Agricole SA, wrote by e-mail yesterday. "They can theoretically print as much koruna as they want."

Hardball in Pictures - Koruna vs. Euro

It seems the "ideal" level of 27 was reached in a day. Of course it is preposterous to propose that anyone, especially central banks have any notion of what the "ideal" level is.

From a consumer standpoint, the more European goods Czech citizens can buy with the Koruna the better. But central banks will have none of that.

About That Eurozone Entry

Wikipedia comments on the Czech Republic Plans to Join the Eurozone.

The Czech Republic planned to adopt the euro in 2012, but its government suspended that plan in 2007. Although the country is economically well positioned to adopt the euro, there is considerable opposition to the move within the Czech Republic. According to a survey conducted in January 2011, only 22% of the Czech population was in favour of replacing the koruna with euro.

One alleged disadvantage of joining the eurozone is giving up the ability to do what the Czech Republic just did.

Of course the ECB is on its own currency debasement mission vs. the US dollar and Japanese Yen as noted in ECB Unexpectedly Cuts Rate to .25%; Draghi Promises Loose Policy for "Extended Period", "Ready to Consider All Instruments"; What Debasement is Next?

Where Does It End?

For years, I have been asking supporters of these competitive currency debasement schemes "where does it end"?

The euro monetarists want a weaker euro vs. the dollar, the yen, and the koruna.
The koruna monetarists want a weaker koruna vs. the euro, the dollar and the yen.
The dollar monetarists don't much care about the euro, but they do want a lower dollar vs. the euro and the yen.

Recently, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph proposed the ECB devalue the Euro to support growth and end deflation.

For further details, please consider Lunatic Howls for Competitive QE Debasement; Another Swan Dive Into Cesspool of Economic Silliness; Following Lemmings Over The Cliff; It's Madness!

How the hell can competitive devaluation work, when every country can "theoretically print as much currency as it wants" and every country wants a declining currency vs. every other currency to support growth?

Ambrose, I am still waiting for the answer to that question.

Given that Ambrose (and every other misguided monetarist on the planet) proposes a mathematical impossibility, I may be waiting for a long time.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Euro Swings Significantly, Gold Dips Following ECB Rate Cut Announcement; US Tapering Coming Up?

Posted: 07 Nov 2013 10:41 AM PST

Here is a 10-minute Euro chart that shows wild swings following the Unexpected ECB Decision to lower rates today.

10-minute Euro Chart

The Euro swung 2 cents vs. the US dollar but has now regained about half of the move.On a percentage basis, these are substantial swings.

10-minute Gold Chart

Charts from Barchart.

Gold fell about $30 following the ECB announcement and has taken back about a third of the decline.

US Tapering Coming Up?

Is competitive currency debasement bad for gold? It shouldn't be.

Likely, this is more of an over-reaction to the still-lingering belief that the Fed is going to taper.

How likely is that? Not very according to Bloomberg columnist Caroline Baum in her article today A GDP Report in Search of Liftoff

While real GDP increased 2.8 percent in the third quarter, inventories accounted for almost a third of the growth. Consumer spending added 1 percentage point and net exports 0.3 percentage point. Real final sales, which is GDP less inventories, rose 2 percent, close to the trend since the recession ended in June 2009. Final sales to domestic purchasers, which excludes exports and includes imports, rose a meager 1.7 percent.

So there you have it. Almost five years of zero-percent interest rates, about $3 trillion of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve and lots of forward guidance on both, and the U.S. economy still can't get out of its own way. Whatever else the Fed decides, tapering asset purchases isn't in the cards any time soon.

Should vs. Will are Horses of a Different Color

Given the huge asset bubbles in equities and corporate bonds, the Fed ought to be tapering now. Then again, given that repetitive bubble blowing never makes any sense, the Fed should never have launched three rounds of QE in the first place.

But what the Fed "should" do and what the Fed "will" do are horses of a different color. Baum is highly likely correct in her assertion "tapering asset purchases isn't in the cards any time soon."

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

ECB Unexpectedly Cuts Rate to .25%; Draghi Promises Loose Policy for "Extended Period", "Ready to Consider All Instruments"; What Debasement is Next?

Posted: 07 Nov 2013 09:22 AM PST

The ECB did the unexpected today, cutting the interest rate to .25% from .50%.
Here is the ECB press release.

7 November 2013 - Monetary policy decisions

At today's meeting the Governing Council of the ECB took the following monetary policy decisions:

The interest rate on the main refinancing operations of the Eurosystem will be decreased by 25 basis points to 0.25%, starting from the operation to be settled on 13 November 2013.

The interest rate on the marginal lending facility will be decreased by 25 basis points to 0.75%, with effect from 13 November 2013.

The interest rate on the deposit facility will remain unchanged at 0.00%.

News Conference Text

Bloomberg has the ECB President Draghi News Conference Text.
Here are a few key snips.

We decided to lower the interest rate on the main refinancing operations of the Eurosystem by 25 basis points to 0.25 percent and the rate on the marginal lending facility by 25 basis points to 0.75 percent. The rate on the deposit facility will remain unchanged at 0.00 percent.
Our monetary policy stance will remain accommodative for as long as necessary.
The Governing Council expects key ECB interest rates to remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time. This expectation continues to be based on an overall subdued outlook for inflation extending into the medium term, given the broad-based weakness of the economy and subdued monetary dynamics.
We are ready to consider all available instruments, and, in this context, we decided today to continue conducting the main refinancing operations as fixed rate tender procedures with full allotment for as long as necessary, and at least until the end of the 6th maintenance period of 2015, more precisely on July 7, 2015.
The Eurosystem's special-term refinancing operations with a maturity of one maintenance period will continue to be conducted for as long as needed, and at least until the end of the second quarter of 2015. The fixed rate in these special-term refinancing operations will be the same as the MRO [main refinancing operation] rate prevailing at the time.
We decided to conduct the three-month longer-term refinancing operations, the LTROs, to be allotted until the end of the second quarter of 2015 as fixed-rate tender procedures with full allotment. The rates in these three-month operations will be fixed at the average rate of the MROs over the life of the respective LTRO.
The risks surrounding the economic outlook for the euro area continue to be on the downside. Developments in global money and financial market conditions and related uncertainties may have the potential to negatively affect economic conditions. Other downside risks include higher commodity prices, weaker than expected domestic demand and export growth, and -- and slow or insufficient implementation of structural reforms in euro area countries.

What Debasement is Next?

It could be anything. Here is the key sentence: "We are ready to consider all available instruments, and, in this context, we decided today to continue conducting the main refinancing operations as fixed rate tender procedures with full allotment for as long as necessary, and at least until the end of the 6th maintenance period of 2015, more precisely on July 7, 2015."

The currency cranks calling for more debasement got their wish today. But given the ECB did not do everything at once, and is only "ready to consider all available instruments", I doubt the cranks will be satisfied.

For further discussion, please see Lunatic Howls for Competitive QE Debasement; Another Swan Dive Into Cesspool of Economic Silliness; Following Lemmings Over The Cliff; It's Madness!

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

vineri, 8 noiembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

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