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3 New Tricks For Tracking Videos with Google Analytics

There's no such thing as a free lunch. But if you don't mind to giving up your commercial data in exchange for free services, Google Analytics is the closest thing to free lunch. This kind of granular tracking used to cost $500/website per month before Google acquired Urchin and gradually rolled out its free analytics based on Urchin's technology.

Google Analytics doesn't just work for html content. It's possible to build hooks into video technology which allows Analytics to report back in depth on who is watching how much of your video. We have described how to do it with FV Player in our guide Using Google Analytics with FV Player some time ago. Now it has been updated with a couple of neat new tricks, that will make your life a lot easier.

1. Tracking errors

It's now easy to track errors. This allows you to quickly correct any issues. You will know if someone tried to watch a video two days ago and it failed to load on his or her iPad.

Keep reading 3 New Tricks For Tracking Videos with Google Analytics

Detailed Video Stats in Google Analytics

Latest version of FV Flowplayer (2.3.13) brings detailed video stats into your Google Analytics account.

Basic Flowplayer version tracks number of seconds played for each users, which then gives you an average value in Google Analytics Events list. However this takes place when you stop the video or leave the page and it's not 100% reliable.

That's why FV Flowplayer now tracks the following events:

Keep reading Detailed Video Stats in Google Analytics

How To Do Social Media Right: Tweet and Get Retweeted

This is the basic outline of the presentation I made at ReBar Toronto. Alec moderated and we fielded a lot of questions together about Google+ and Facebook after the presentation. Alas, we only have detailed notes from the opening presentation.

The first rule of tweeting the right way is to actually have something to say. No one can accuse you of spam if you share something that’s of real value to them. You should always remember that. If you are tweeting about something which you wrote or posted to your own website, make sure you would want to read it first before starting to promote it to other people.

Keep reading How To Do Social Media Right: Tweet and Get Retweeted

Quora SEO: Best single resource to learn SEO

Every week Quora will mail you questions and answers which you might be interested in. In my inbox just arrived Aaron Wall's answer to the question "What's the most awesome SEO material I can lay my hands on?" Aaron and I go back a long way and I'm always interested in what he has to say about SEO, so I clicked through.


Aaron Wall of SEObook: would you take SEO advice from someone
living in a trailer park. In the case of Aaron Wall, mostly yes.

I was astonished at how facile and amorphous Aaron's answer was, apart from the first sentence (which is a very important distinction). Enough to comment on it and write this post.

Keep reading Quora SEO: Best single resource to learn SEO

Dropbox doing a Gmail: drops support for unpaid users

If you use an unpaid dropbox account, be very careful. The support demands currently exceed supply and you are unlikely to get any help.

Dropbox Support, Feb 19 12:18 am (PST):

Hi,

Thank you for your support request. Recently, we have been receiving a high volume of support requests and haven't been able to get back to you within a reasonable amount of time.

The volume of inquiries we receive on a daily basis prevents us from responding to all requests. Although requests from Pro and Teams users will be given priority assistance, we will do our best to get back to other inquiries when possible. If you are not a Pro or Teams user and you're looking to resolve your issue before we can respond, you may want to check out:

https://www.dropbox.com/help/

If you need to restore a large number of files and are unable to do so, please visit the following instructions to help us speed up the restoration for you:

http://db.tt/2QPImJ3g

If you are still experiencing problems, please reply to this message. We will try our best to get back to you, however we cannot guarantee a response. We're very sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,
The Dropbox Support Team
 

We use Dropbox a lot and this is a worry for us.

Keep reading Dropbox doing a Gmail: drops support for unpaid users

How to move an old website to a new site address and retain Google rankings

We've just had to move another client's old site to a new one.

There are lots of inbound links but the page URL structure has completely changed for the better.

The client wants to rank right away.

What do we do?

301 the old site is the traditional answer.

Not so fast says Eric Ward who is one of the masters of link building, having built links by hand for longer than almost anyone else on the internet and for more large corporate clients than any individual I know (there are some SEO companies working fairly stealth with portfolios of almost 100 big names):

I wouldn't 301 it yet. First I'd run a backlink analysis on the old site and then visit each site linking to the old site, and for those that look exceptionally trustworthy and legit, ask them personally for a hand edit to change the link from the old site to the new site.

Painful.
Slow.
Tedious.

Effective.

Frankly for a website with thousands of backlinks, that's just not a realistic option. Well for Walt Disney or some of Eric's other clients perhaps it is. But what should the rest of us do?

Keep reading How to move an old website to a new site address and retain Google rankings

Low returns, safe investment in Tech? No, it’s the dawn of a new golden age

Have tech companies gone blue chip: no risk, little reward?

Over at purveyor of dubious business advice The Wall Street Journal, Mean Street says it is so:

The good news: Tech stocks are the blue chips of today’s economy. The companies are bigger and better run than ever before.

Still not convinced this sector has matured? Today, there are eight U.S. tech companies with market caps greater than $100 billion. Only three U.S. financial institutions are worth that much. Three. Last week, technology surpassed financials as the biggest component of the S&P 500.

The bad news: Tech stocks are the blue chips. Lower risk means lower reward. Are tech investors mentally prepared for the 10% equity return including a 2% dividend

Those are amazing numbers. Tech companies are bigger than banks. Curiously tech - and entertainment and weapon systems - seem to be the only products in which the US is a world leader these days.

Despite the huge market cap of the top tech companies, I think Evan Newmark is off base on the future of tech.

Keep reading Low returns, safe investment in Tech? No, it's the dawn of a new golden age

Losing Mail with Google Apps

One of my clients recently moved to Google Apps as their full time email solution.

I had my reservations at the time, but more on privacy grounds than technology ones. It turns out there are technology issues as well. My client was very excited about improved spam filtering from Postini. After the move he told me right away that he was getting a lot less spam.

This same client runs an insurance business with online application forms. Those forms go to special unfiltered email boxes. Of course those addresses aren't released publicly.

So they get all their forms and don't have to worry about miscreant insurance filters (most of my other clients are in real estate and we have filtering issues in real estate and mortgages as well).

Over the holidays, we couldn't figure out why Adwords was sometimes claiming more completed applications than the client was receiving. My tests were working. Finally we compared lists.

My client wasn't getting all the completed applications that were going into the database.

It turns out that Google Apps/Mail were deleting quotations (even though they were coming from his own domain).

What's the solution?

Keep reading Losing Mail with Google Apps

What is an idea worth?

Short essay about what an idea is worth. The right idea could be worth $361 million per person – or nothing.

AdSense Arbitrage Coming to an End – Internet Marketing

It’s official – Google will be kicking the AdSense spammers off the network.

What AdSense spam is are those sites which you arrive on via either organic search or PPC results (usually the former) and you find nothing but RSS feeds or chopped up articles on a very basic template. The sites rarely have any contact information. To be blunt, they are of no value at all except to their owner who brings in traffic at one price and sells it off at another price.

Keep reading AdSense Arbitrage Coming to an End – Internet Marketing

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