Feedburner Pro Stats and MyBrand Are Now Free Services

Just a month ago, Google acquired Feedburner, making many in the blogosphere happy since it almost ensures this great service will remain for some time to come.

Per the Feedburner blog: “Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free.”

Feedburner’s basic services were great for providing a consolidated feed, regardless of flavor (RSS, Atom, etc.) TotalStats provides a bit more in-depth reporting on exactly who is using the feed and how it is being read.

Feedburner’s MyBrand allows you to use your own domain name as the feed url in place of this standard format: http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeedname

Thanks Google!

Details Are Necessary Before Claiming Something is Wrong With a Web Site

This really grinds my gears. Every 3-4 weeks, I’ll get an urgent email or call. The escalation chain goes something like this:

Consumer writes to Customer Service.
> Customer Service Rep forwards to Customer Service Supervisor.
>> Customer Service Supervisor forwards to Associate Marketing Manager.
>>> Associate Marketing Manager forwards to Marketing Manager.
>>>> Marketing Manager forwards to agency Account Manager.
>>>>> Agency Account Manager forwards to me.

Along the way, each person tacks on a message about how urgent this is, get back to me right away, yada yada yada.

By the time I see it, the email thread is fairly lengthy. When I scroll down to the original message, it typically says something like this:

“Your web site doesn’t work.”

[sigh…] I take application bugs seriously, but it never occurs to anyone that this is not enough information to make a guess as to what the problem was. So I’ll spend a half hour reviewing the site, testing functionality and forms, and looking at our Web Analytics to see if there were any traffic spikes or periods of no data that might indicate there was a problem with the Web hosting. 100% of the time I find nothing wrong. So I say nothing wrong could be identified by the information we have.

Of course clients want to hear that something was wrong because “the customer is always right.”

Then I have to reeducate everyone again that the user did not report any details that could help identify what the problem might be. It could be any number of things:

• User didn’t say what he was tying to specifically do.
• Maybe the user is not waiting for a Flash movie to play.
• User may be on slow dial-up connection, not broadband. Or possibly sharing Internet connection on a network that is congested due to heavy use by other users.
• User might be using outdated operating system and browser version we are not currently supporting. (e.g. Windows 98 and IE 5)
• User may be using a computer that is very old/slow, loaded with many applications or malware that freezes from Flash, video or other functionality.
• The user may be impatient and clicking everything and causing the browser/computer to freeze.
• We don’t know if user only tried once. If user tries again, it might be fine.
• Maybe the site is blocked by the military/school/company/organization that the user is accessing the Internet through.

Having someone say the Web site doesn’t work is too vague to confirm if it is a Web hosting issue, programming issue, database issue, hardware issue, software issue or user issue.

It is critical to try to educate the Customer Support team to ask more detailed questions when they get obscure comments. The following is the minimum amount of information we need to recreate and identify problems:

• What type of computer being used: brand, processor specs, memory (e.g. Dell Latitude D610 Intel Pentium M processor 1.86GHz, 2 GB RAM)
• What Operating System (e.g. Windows XP Professional)
• What type of Internet connection (i.e. DSL, Cable, T1, Dial-up)
• What Web browser and version (e.g. Apple Safari 2.0.4, Firefox 2.0.0.4, Internet Explorer 7)
• Specifically what day and time (including time zone) did the user try to access the Web site?
• What specifically did the user try to do?
• What happened as a result of the user’s actions?

Also, design contact forms to capture useful information. Clients tend to ignore this, but as a result, we waste a lot of time down the road troubleshooting vague claims.

The user was kind enough to report a problem. But without details, it’s unlikely any problem can be identified.

Please let me know if you found this useful.
Thanks.
-Roland

Apple Safari Web Browser For Windows - Will You Support It?

In case you hadn’t heard, Apple announced last week at their developers conference that they’ve made available a beta version of the next Safari Web browser. What’s significant is that they are releasing Safari 3 for both Mac and Windows Operating Systems.

It’s an interesting turnaround in the market. Microsoft maintains about 85% market share of the browser market. Mozilla Organization’s Firefox browser is responsible for eroding Internet Explorer’s share and has about 10% share of Windows users in just two years. Other browsers such as Opera maintain single digit percentages. Two years ago Microsoft stopped supporting Internet Explorer for Mac OS X. Now Apple is trying to gain another foot hold on Windows desktops, presumably since they had great success at getting a Windows version of iTunes installed there.

What does this means to you?

Have you thought about the extra labor it might cause on your end to support yet another combination of operating system and Web browser?

Making HTML and other browser technologies work consistently across the different flavors of Windows and Mac OS X and many browsers is very time consuming.

When sending out contracts (transaction documents, statements of work), please be very careful about defining what operating systems and Web browsers you intend to develop and test for.

If you make vague and broad statements, it could expose you to many more labor hours than expected to account for consistent user experiences.

Finally, always check your Web Analytics to identify what type of OS/browser combinations the majority of your Web site visitors account for. Never assume you or your client knows what that majority of your audience is using.

Good luck!
-Roland

Google Analytics Rolls Out New Interface and Features

I just received an email from Google informing me of the new enhancements being rolled out to Google Analytics.

If you haven’t used it before, Google Analytics is an amazing, free Web analytics application. Originally developed as Urchin and acquired by Google in the fall of 2005, Google Analytics is a full feature Web analytics application.

Hello from Google Analytics,

We are happy to announce the release of a new version of the
Google Analytics reporting interface. Since you are an existing
user, you will automatically be upgraded - there is no action
required on your part. To access this new version click the “View
Reports” link next to any profile in your account by logging in at
http://www.google.com/analytics.

For a smooth transition, we’ve listed some helpful resources and
notes below. Also, you will still be able to access your old
reporting interface for at least a month by clicking “Previous
Interface” below the “View Reports” link for any profile in your
account. Other than a few improvements detailed in the version
notes below, your data and configuration settings remain
unaffected by your choice of interface and your data continues to
be tracked in the same way as it was prior to this redesign.

*What is new?* In the new version, your reports have been
redesigned for clarity, greater visibility of important metrics,
and ease of use. Here are just a few of the features you’ll
notice:

- Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc
personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.

- Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all
the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can
email to others.

- Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select
date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.

- Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion
University tips are available from every report.

The new interface has everything the previous interface had and
more. In addition, links within reports make it easier to navigate
related information and explore your data.

The following resources are available to help you get the most
from the new Google Analytics interface:

- Report Finder Tool: will help you see where data from the
previous interface is located within the new version (it is
also linked to from within your reports on the left
navigation menu):
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/static.py?page=v1v2map.cs

- Product tour:
http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html

- FAQs for more details about the new version:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/static.py?page=FAQ.cs

- Help Center: includes articles related to the new version:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/

- Support: if you encounter any issues with the new version
that you can’t resolve with the help center, you can contact
our support team through the Contact Us link at the bottom of
the help center web page, or receive higher-touch support
through a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant. Find one
here:
http://www.google.com/analytics/support_partner_provided.html

- Analytics Help Forum: If you would like to discuss the new
version or get tips from experienced users, please visit the
Analytics Help Forum in English within Google Groups at:
http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help

A few notes about the new version:

- The new version works best with Flash 7 or higher. Most
browsers have this installed already, if yours does not,
please download it at Adobe.com .

- Google Analytics now uses the same geo-data source as
AdWords, therefore, map and geo-location report results may
vary slightly between the previous interface and the new
interface. For those of you with filters designed for
geo-data, you may want to verify the results and edit if
necessary.

- Limiting the Available Reports for a profile by specifying
which Report Dashboards and Report Categories are available
has been removed from the product in favor of the new
customizable Google Analytics dashboard. If you would like to
limit the availability of data within a certain profile for
certain users, we recommend removing those users from the
profile and instead scheduling an email to deliver data to
them.

We hope you find the new version even more useful and thank you
for using Google Analytics!

I only spent five minutes digging around and I am extremely excited. There was a lot of reorganization to put more data points on a single screen — extremely helpful to reduce the amount of clicking to gather a complete picture of certain metrics.

It also “feels” like the data loads much faster than before. I’m blazing through these screens.

The feature I don’t see yet is the ability to add comments on certain dates/milestones. That would be helpful to identify historical events tied to traffic spikes.

Definitely check out Google Analytics if you haven’t done so already.
-Roland

Web site design and style suggestions

WebDesignFromScratch.com has an interesting Web 2.0 do/don’t design guide.

Check it out.

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