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Monday January 5th Roundup


A new year,
a new web roundup

Another short roundup this week. Most of our staff is away, and have been for the last five days, leaving us without much good input for the Monday roundup.

In this weeks roundup: manipulation of human irrationality, more CSS3, and Firefox increases in market share

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Google Analytics Power User Part 3: Visitors: Map Overlay


Apparently we have viewers in Greenland

Next up in the series of most useful Google Analytics reports is the Map Overlay report.

The Map Overlay report is found under the Visitors tab. Simply put, this report allows you to see (visually on a map) where your visitors are located and how visitors from different locations behave.

Note: Google Analytics captures the visitors IP address, which is a piece of Personally Identifiable information (PII), just long enough to use to for a geo-IP look up. After GA has thrown out the IP address it still knows where each IP was located, and can plot a visitors location on the map.

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Google Website Optimizer Hint: Beware of Small Numbers, Don't Rush to Judgment


Science takes time.

Whenever we're about to launch a new experiment, I always give clients the same speech. It goes something like this:

"You probably won't be able to resist logging into GWO and checking the results every day. But always bear in mind that experiments cannot yield reliable results until they have run long enough to gather sufficient data. Early results are often surprising -- even alarming -- but you must resist jumping to conclusions. Let the experiment run its course."

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Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Integration

A few weeks ago, ROI revolution published a great post about an updated script for integrating Website Optimizer with your Google Analytics reports. This script uses some of the new functions within the siteopt.js file I posted about last week.

Here's a link to the original post:
Website Optimizer Wednesdays - Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics Renew Their Vows

This is basically an updated version of a script they released 18 months previously.

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Regular Expression to determine if a base 10 number is divisible by 3

Original posted on Erik Vold's Blog

The Problem:

For the regular language L = { w | w mod 3 = 0 }, where the alphabet is {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}; give the deterministic finite automaton (DFA) for L, and convert this to a regular expression.

The Solution:

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Monday December 29th Roundup

This is our first week with everyone back on task. Shorter round-up, again, since most of our staff has been away.

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Monday December 22nd Roundup

Well, I am away for Christmas week, so this post has to get finished early, meaning that we're a little short of content.

This week we have interface tricks for Omniture's SiteCatalyst, some SEO science on why you should sometimes "avoid the average", research on how social media links affect ranking, and our own Erik Vold on how to modify adword tracking code.

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5 Ways Google may be Watching You

I am a privacy advocate. I have been for as long as I can remember. I've written more papers on surveillance as power, the panopticon, plague theory, balancing surveillance power between corporate, government, and social spheres, the panoptic society, cellphone cameras, cookies, the information society, information-databases and the value of information, than I care to account for.

Now I work for a company that specializes in Google Analytics. Go figure.

In the spirit of the Christmas season, and privacy concerns—what with age old threats of panoptic surveillance from the north pole—I figured that I should take a look at how Google watches you, and whether you should care.

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Ecommerce Hint #3: Don't get clever with icons. Just say it!

John Hossack recently sent me a link to www.dumoulin.com. Included with the link was a challenge: "Try to check out".

I'm always up for a game. Mysteries, puzzles, codes... I love them all. And as I soon discovered, dumoulin.com is teeming with them!

First thing I did was open a product description page. Notable by its absence was a link or button reading "Add to Cart". But I did spot an icon depicting an arrow pointing into a shopping cart. Ahhh... secret code. Very clever!

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AdWords Editor 7.0 Released


Adwords Editor 7.0 is out!

Google only recently released AdWords Editor 6.5 and already we see AdWords Editor 7. Here are the new features:

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