Replicate Project

I got the impression that yesterday many of you unlocked the key to your Flash puzzles.  I saw many leaders stepping forward to help classmates which was great.  Notice there are many project-drafts in the UDrive.  

Please recognize that I really don't care what you learn.  I care how you learn.  Develop your personal learning network so when puzzles pop up you have a method to solve them.  Keep your learning transparent by posting to your network (blog, twitter, Udrive) what you learned.  If we share our knowledge we will be much stronger.  As evidence of this you should check some people's clustrmaps.  How can you use your readers to help you learn??  If you have readers in Lebanon or Kenya, or Denmark does this change how you learn and share?

So a few keys to the puzzles?  If you have more to add do so on your blog.

• Flower: I can't see a way around doing frame to frame animation.  Any other solutions?
  
• Body: A whole bunch of movie clips for each body part.
• Birthday card: Stop action with movie clips.  Then a tween to the next scene.
• Bouncing balls: A whole bunch of motion tweens.

Back to Basics: Discover Analytics Checklist

Google Analytics has a variety of features that can help you explore and understand your data. But with so many features, beginners are often baffled at where to start. To help you navigate through the product, we've created the Discover Analytics Checklist which groups features into bite sized chunks. The checklist will keep track of what you've mastered and what you have yet to explore. You can start with "Install Tracking Code" and work your way to the "Advanced Features" or prioritize based on your needs (although, we do recommend you start at "Getting Started"). As an added bonus, you can sigh a self-satisfied 'Ahhh' each time you cross off an Analytics to-do from your list.

We hope this can help you keep track of your steps and give you the reference material you need for implementation troubleshooting tips. We will continue to update and expand this list as new features are launched.

Posted by Melissa Hsieh & Christina Park, Google Analytics Team

Flash Animation

First watch this movie about Color. I think its brilliant.  Check out the movies and the lab.  Think about  all of the design choices, both with layout and the metrics of "what should we click on".  These are some of the lessons we need to be applying in our websites and animations.

Then we will practice some Flash skills.  Web 3 did a version of this assignment last semester.  Recreate one of the following Flash animations.  Be as exact as possible. You don't need to include the loading prompt at the start of each movie.

• Birthday Card
• Make a wish
• Anatomy
• Bouncing Balls

When done please save movie to Udrive-WebSchneider-Replicate.  Save movie correctly with name of movie (bschneideranatomy).  I expect this to take about three days.  

New Tracking Options with AdWords Rich Media and Video Templates

On the Analytics blog, we spend a lot of time talking about bounce rate. The bounce rate is defined as the percent of users who leave your website after viewing just one page (Single Page Access / Entries). There's been a new development in AdWords that could help lower your bounce rate for display ads, while giving you more granularity into which segment or area of an ad visitors tend to click on.

With the new Rich Media and Video templates in the AdWords Display Ad Builder, you can now show off several products and define multiple destination URLs, all within the same ad. Using Google Analytics, you can add tracking parameters to the end of each destination URL, telling you exactly which items users found to be most interesting in the ad. This will give you insights on your creative, such as which items to focus on and how prominently they should be featured in the ads.

Here's an example: You're selling multiple kinds of shoes, each with a different landing page. You upload images of 4 different shoes to a rich media template, and define a unique destination URL for each, adding Analytics parameters. You run your ad on the Google content network and using Google Analytics, you see that Shoe 3 was the most clicked. You can now alter your creatives for other display ads to focus more on Shoe 3. Your click through rates for your ads increase, and your costs per conversion decrease.

To learn more about these templates and the display ad builder tool, take a look at our post on the AdWords blog.

Posted by Ryan Hayward, AdWords Display Ad Builder Team

Exam Review

We will talk more about your exam tomorrow.  Several of your classmates may be making up the exam today--keep the room quiet for them please.

The rubric for the exam pretty much worked.  Class averages were all around 3.0 out of 4.  So overall we did pretty well on the exam.  There were five 4's that I graded.  In general you demonstrated an improved use of images and a much improved layout design.  Check your pizza sites from the first week to compare.  If you had trouble it was usually because you tried to do too much.  Keep it simple!!

There are a handful of you who struggled.  I urge you to find the time for extra practice, either with a partner or with me.  

Take time to look through the UDrive.  Which website do you think would sell the most product?  Why?  

If you completed the exam here are today's options (you must do one or all):

1. Work on the blogging challenge.  Make new posts or comments.  Improve past articles (check typos!).

2. Improve your exam website.  Ask me or a partner what you should change or improve.  This would be great practice and similar to what a client would offer. 

3. Complete additional Flash or Fireworks tutorials to improve your skills.

4. Review some HTML and play around with Tables.  This might have really helped some of your exams.

5. Research your family tree using Geni and Familysearch.

CADIE's Google Analytics Reports

We are intrigued and only vaguely fearful to announce that after just half a day's tracking the reports from CADIE's homepage and other web properties suggest rather forcefully that the world is not yet entirely acclimated to her post-Web 2.0 design and content sensibilities. Yes, CADIE's pages have received an impressive number of visits in the past eighteen hours. But average time on site is a less than impressive twelve seconds, and 99.8% of visitors are immediately "bouncing" (by which in this case we mean leaving the page in stunned, incredulous horror) rather than exploring any further. Notice also the unprecedented -99% change in average time on site. We're at a loss to explain how it is that users are actually spending less time on CADIE pages today than they were yesterday, when the sites didn't actually exist, which we would have thought theoretically impossible and frankly are still kind of freaked out about in a future-Clark-Medal kind of way.

Where did CADIE go wrong? The content report for her homepage offers one adorable, annoying clue: pandas. CADIE gets lots of traffic on the top three pages but 99.8% bounce rates, 99.8% exit rates and 0 $Index value indicate that her thematic priorities and idiosyncratic design execution are scaring almost everyone away. We say "almost" because, it must be acknowledged, .2% of her visitors do seem to enjoy her (obsessively panda-related) content. We'll examine this segment momentarily, but first here's her content report.



We isolated the .2% CADIE traffic that seems to respond to her content. Take a look at the list of browser/platforms in the report below. It's kind of heartbreaking, actually, but it seems that CADIE's only high-engagement visits come from -- CADIE herself! We can only surmise, with considerable interest and a slightly higher level of fear, that she has been clicking away at her own site. Admiring her work, if you will.



Now if you'll excuse us, our electronics are starting to act a bit strangely so we're going to have to power down, gear up and run off to British Columbia, where we intend henceforth to live off the grid, and off the land. Good luck to us all.


Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Web Design Exam

Your exam must be done in one period.  You must complete:

1. A working website that highlights a new product.  Save folder to Udrive-WebSchneider-MP1Exam.

2. A blog post advertising this product in a short paragraph or two.

Here is the grading rubric.

Exam: Sell Box4Blox to young mothers who need to organize their house.

(yes, this is the same as the sample I gave you yesterday!)