Google Analytics – A Business Necessity

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Google Analytics is a reliable enterprise-level web analytics application that get’s tied into your website, your blog, and even your e-commerce store. Google Analytics is intelligent, offers advanced reporting and data segmentation, and is easily customizable.

But it’s most important attribute is: it’s gratis.

Do not allow it’s free nature to nurture disbelief that free solutions are resigned exclusively in small organizations or somehow diminished in its capacity to provide enterprise-level value. In a recent survey by Forrester Consulting to evaluate the use of Web Analytics within US-based enterprise organizations, a staggering 71% used “free” tools in some capacity. These companies achieved revenues in excess of $500 million annually and employed more than 1,000 employees.

So why is Google Analytics a necessity of business, now more than ever?

As the Web rounds out its second decade of existence, the practice of measuring visitor activity within online properties has become commonplace. Web analytics programs that ascend beyond mere clicks and visits are ones that derive insight from their data. Leading organizations use Web analytics data to achieve greater relevance in automated actions such as dynamically targeted content, and justify budgets based on historic and predictive modeling. Companies that apply Web analytics in this manner obliterate guesswork marketing and develop online programs with the evidence of past performance, projected outcomes, and clear expectations of returns.

Professional Integration

If you’re currently “in the dark” with your website and interested in integrating Google Analytics, or perhaps you’re not satisfied with your current Web analytics tool, contact us so we can discuss your business needs.

Google Wave: The Future

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

On September 30th of 2009, Google launched Wave, a real-time communication platform that is robust and best of all open-source.

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is many things, but to paraphrase it into one line, Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more… You can bring together groups of friends, clients, or business partners together (in real-time) to discuss how your project is going, share files by simply dragging and dropping (everyone will have instant access), or simply discuss how your day is progressing.

What is a Wave?

A wave is a conversation with multiple participants — participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It’s also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.

Technological Snap-shot:

Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like

Affordable Web Hosting

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

From the thousands of web hosting companies that flood the Internet airwaves… have you wondered which one is right for you? Here are just a few solid web hosting companies, with affordable rates:

Web Host Price (as low as)
Network Solutions $6.97/mo
HostGator $4.95/mo
LunarPages $2.95/mo
SuperGreen $4.95/mo
APlus Hosting $5.95/mo
IPage Hosting $3.50/mo
JustHost $3.45/mo