Custom variables webinar available for your viewing pleasure

Custom variables is one of the most powerful features in Google Analytics. With them you can segment traffic by almost any attribute. We recently hosted a webinar on how to make the most effective use of custom variables. If you missed it, you can now watch this highly informative webinar on the Google Analytics YouTube channel.

If you’re interested in learning how to use this powerful feature in Google Analytics, sit yourself down with some popcorn this Friday night and get analyzing.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Back to Hits

Over the years we’ve worked hard to make complex data easy to access and easy to understand. We’ve released features like Advanced Segmentation, which lets you segment your traffic on the fly, Custom Reporting-- the ability to create and share your own reports--, and Analytics Intelligence, an algorithmic intelligence engine that automatically spots important changes in traffic. All of this work was done with the belief that you needed this data in order to make sense of your website traffic.

We’re big believers that data trumps opinion, so we set out to prove our belief. We’ll be the first to admit that we were wrong. After extensive analysis by our quantitative teams, we’ve uncovered that hits (or How Interneters Track Success) is the only metric that actually matters in web analytics. Forget that business about absolute unique visitors, goal completion rate, or even bounce rate. If you want to achieve success, you need to focus on hits.

With this finding, we’ve gone back to the drawing board with the Google Analytics interface. Since this will be a major change, we want to share with you a preview of the new Google Analytics UI:

(click to view full-size)

To help you make this transition, Avinash Kaushik is releasing a new book: Web Analytics 3.0 - The Greatest Hits. The new book (more of a thick brochure, really) is chock full of nearly 1,000 words on how to use hits to track your success. It’s your chance to learn how to hit from a true analytics ninja. Plus it’s much shorter than most of his blog posts.

We’re looking forward to exploring the next stage of web analytics with you. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a hit counter to watch.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team & Hits Master

100+ Twitter Tips & Tricks You May Not Know

Twitter Tips and Tricks To Drive Traffic To Your Sites

Every month I receive around 100,000 visitors to my websites just from Twitter alone and so can every single one of you! I know a lot of you enjoyed the tips I shared in my FREE eCourse about making money online blogging and driving traffic to your blog from Twitter so today I decided to do an updated twitter guide so you can benefit more from Twitter like myself. The great thing with Twitter is the people using it are so diverse, whatever your business is about, you can find people related to your business.

10 awesome Twitter tricks

Every Twitter users is looking for the ladder to boost his/her following. You might be one of them trying to increase your Twitter followers. You must be looking for more public reading your updates. For sure you must be tired of trying out weirdest things to build followers in Twitter.

Twittin' Secrets: The 100 World's Greatest Twitter Tips & Twitter Secrets

There are a lot of wimpy "Twitter Tip Lists" out there; this is NOT one of them. These 100+ Twitter Tips go from insightful Twitter toddler level to pure genius (or as one might say, "Twenius"). Even if you think you're a Twitter social or Twitter business pro, you might want to start from the beginning - this is one hefty shovel full of "Twitter How-to" that people all around the world have touted as "the best" (see tweet map below). Links to the other tips in this series are at the very bottom. Have fun!

Top 10 Twitter Tips & Tools for Fighting Spam

Twitter spam can be quite a problem when you tend to follow people back out of courtesy. There are literally tons of bots and fake accounts out there who are merely interested in selling you dodgy pharmaceutical goods, and questionable MLM schemes. Here are the top 10 free tools for dealing with Twitter Spam.

250+ Web Design Inspirations : iPhone

38 Mobile (iPhone) Sites

As you may probably know mobile design is getting more and more popular, particularly the iPhone design. Almost every popular website or web app offers a mobile version now. In this post, I’ve collected a list of 38 nicely designed sites (ranging from personal, blog, portoflio, editoral, web app, etc.) that are optimized for iPhone. I hope this list will come in handy when you need to design a mobile site for yourself or clients. Now have you iPhone ready and enjoy the list.

80+ iPhone Inspired Website Designs For Your Inspiration

So Again, Inspiration is something different then copying or stealing. Of Course, they are related to some extant but there are enough talk already happened in past to draw the lines in between. It’s also often heard by designers that “Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal“. No one knows for sure as some people believes that “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination”

25 Great Examples of iPhone Optimized Sites

During the weekend I decided to work on the iPhone version of Abduzeedo. Firstly I thought that only a few tweaks in the CSS file would be enough, but it was a bit more complicated than that. However, there are quite a few ways to create a nice iPhone version for your site using services like Mobify.me. In my case, I decided to build a new Drupal theme from scratch.

50 Inspiring iPhone Application Websites

One thing that many of the iPhone application websites have ‘in common’ is their beautiful and inspiring design. They simply look amazing. The colors are great, the typography is classy, the photos, spaces and reflections are astonishing. The websites are so visual appealing that it is very good to browse around to get inspired and also to find a cool app for you (in case you have an iPhone). And as I’m always looking around for inspiring sites, I found that making a selection of iPhone app sites would give us a great list! So here we are… with 50 samples of beautiful, classy, stylish and many times minimalist websites designs. Here you will find inspiration in many different subjects of web design – such as typography, colors scheme, textures, layouts, images disposal and so on. So sit back and enjoy these pretty inspiring websites!

35 Beautiful iPhone App Website Designs

I’ve always been a fan of Apple’s design. As a web designer, I’m sure that many of you are. When Apple released the iPhone and iPod Touch, thousands of apps hit the app store. As a result, web designers started creating sites for Apple apps. These sites promote, give information about, and help sell these apps. In this showcase, you’ll find 35 beautiful handpicked app websites.

20+ Amazing iPhone App Websites

How do the latest and most sought out iPhone applications stand out from the rest? By developing an incredible website design that displays these applications in the best possible way. Many of these sites are clean, run smoothly, and are organized for a better user experience. Below you will find 20+ Amazing Site Designs of Exclusive iPhone Apps for your inspiration. Feel free to comment on any of these designs, or provide a link to one we might of missed.

100+ Collection Of New Jquery Plugins And Tutorials

10 New jQuery Plugins You Have to Know

I haven't done a roundup for jQuery plugins for quite a while, but I have noticed that there are quite a few of new jQuery plugins out there and they really caught my attention because of its design and application. So, this is the 10 jQuery plugins that I have collected for last few weeks.

30 The Best jQuery plugins inspired from Twitter and Facebook

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery plugins are an integral part of modern web design.

20 Superb jQuery Plugins to Enhance Your Photo Gallery.

We can’t stop admiring this great new technology – jQuery and it really seems that web developers just don’t want to stop creating more and more new and awesome plugins that can do simply anything. Looks like you can’t find a more convenient way to enhance your website than by using jQuery tools. Graphic content means a lot in today’s web and we’ve decided to create a small collection of most notable jQuery plugins that will enrich and enhance your Photo Gallery. So, let’s start!

21 Best jQuery Tooltip Plugins, Demos, Examples & Tutorials

Today we are posting some attractive, Handy and useful jquery Tooltip plugins for your new projects. If the tooltip is being used appropriately, it can improve our site’s user friendly level, and also save us a lot of spaces.

5 Fresh jQuery Plugins Make You Love Your HTML Forms More

Working with HTML forms is really a nightmare because your forms always mess up. This post includes 5 newest and useful jQuery plugins that help you work with HTML forms better and love them more. Enjoy the post in the series of jQuey plugins that is always fresh and useful.

25 Incredible jQuery Slider Tutorials and Plugins

Content sliders are a great way to show large amount of content or images on a smaller area in a website or blog. They are commonly used in portfolio sites, corporate sites or blogs. You may probably heard that jQuery isn’t very hard to learn. If you are interested in implementing a content slider in your website please check our jQuery tutorials and plugins collection.

9 Useful jQuery Calendar And Date Picker Plugins For Web Designers

Event calendars and date pickers are really useful plugins for web applications. Wordpress does have a date picker, which allow bloggers to schedule the article.

10 New jQuery Plugins To Spice Up Your Website

jQuery is an amazing JavaScript library that makes it easy to create wonderful web effects in just a few lines of code. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. Here are some stunning new jQuery plugins that will make your website fancy and cool.

New In AdWords: Search Funnels

Yesterday, AdWords announced the launch of Search Funnels, a new set of reports available only in AdWords that describe the Google search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion. They are rolling out over the next few weeks and work if you are using AdWords Conversion Tracking or importing your Google Analytics goals into AdWords.

What are Search Funnels?

Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad clicked before the conversion happened. However, it's likely that customers perform multiple searches prior to finally converting.

These reports provide data on how "upper-funnel" keywords behave on the conversion path prior to the last ad click. These funnels are not to be confused with funnels in Google Analytics, which are on-site funnels. These are the paths users take when seeing and clicking on your ads after doing a search on google.com, on the way to converting. They look back 30 days prior to the conversion.

In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consists of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last ClickAnalysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. Take a look at this video giving an overview of the new reports, and at the AdWords blog post to learn more.

How is this useful?
Search Funnels data gives you more data to help you gauge the true value of your keyword and ads in AdWords. By showing whether an ad was shown prior to a conversion and whether it was clicked or not, they help you analyze assist relationships. For instance, find out whether generic keywords actually contributed to conversions occurring from a branded keyword search, and vice versa. You're no longer limited to a last-click perspective in AdWords.

Take a look at the AdWords help center for a complete description of the new reports and metrics. These reports are currently in beta, and again, they'll be available in your AdWords account over the next few weeks. Bravo AdWords!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Inspiration : Creative 404 Error Pages Design

Creative 404 Error Pages Around for Inspiration

Creative 404 Error Pages Design - In this article below, we’ll take a look at Various Creative 404 Error Pages Around for your source of inspiration which help you to built your own custom error page.

404 Error Pages: Reloaded

Three weeks ago we’ve showcased some of the most beautiful, creative and user-friendly 404 Error Pages; we’ve collected some interesting ideas one can use to help out the visitors once they got lost ony your page. We’ve also asked our readers to design their own 404 pages and promised to present the best solutions afterwards.

49 Nice And Creative Error 404 Pages

Whether you have a broken link on your site or your visitors happened to come from a site that incorrectly hyperlinked your site; they are likely to land on a error page. If this error page is properly handled, the visitor will be reading a Error 404 page.

50 Creative and Inspiring 404 Pages

Whenever a user is trying to reach a website’s page that is non-existent or missing, they are usually directed to a page where they’re informed that that specific page cannot be recalled by the HTTP server; this is what is called a 404 error page.

Creative 404 Error Pages With Characters

What if viewers come to your blog or site looking for something and it doesn’t exist. What would you like them to do? Would you like them to stay on your site?, of course you would like to engage them, here comes the 404 error page.

50 Examples of Creative 404 – Page Not Found Pages

There are two ways you can go when designing a 404 page for your website – you could go the sensible route and make it usable and try to help the reader find exactly what they were looking for or, you could design a 404 page that not only defines the character of the web site or the designer, but also makes it a pleasure and surprise. Its amazing the effect a sprinkle of humor and some creativity can have on someone and it will certainly make your site that little bit more memorable.

404 Error Pages, One More Time

The design of 404 error pages is often overlooked and underestimated. However, designed carefully, these pages can make a random visitor stay on your website, take a look around and eventually find the information he or she was looking for in the first place. Effective 404 error pages communicate why a particular page couldn’t be displayed and what users can do next. A search box and list of useful resources (possibly related to the missing page) could be helpful in this case.We’ve already covered the design of 404 error pages in previous posts. In them, we also covered some interesting and useful ideas for designing 404 pages. Now, it’s time for a fresh dose of 404-error inspiration. This article presents 50 more examples of beautiful and original 404 error designs. Some of them are beautiful but not user-friendly, others are user-friendly but not really beautiful. Please use these examples as a source of inspiration; hopefully, this showcase has something for everybody.

25 Creative 404 Error Page Designs

A lot of websites don’t have a 404 error page, but having a good one is very important. We can’t stop a user from landing on the 404 error page, but we can give a helping hand to guide them back to the homepage. If you don’t have an Error 404 page on your website or blog, you should really think about creating one soon. Here are 25 Creative 404 Error Pages to give you some inspiration and ideas to get you started. Thank you for reading and enjoy.