If you ask me, what are the chances that I will browse in an Internet Explorer ever again. My answer is, rare, almost none. Unless of course, for that occasional Windows Updates (The Windows Update website won’t work on other browsers other than IE) for security patches, and patches, and more patches. Or, clicking that mail button in MSN Messenger which triggers the IE browser, or, checking if my CSS designs work in IE.

Since I’ve made that switch to Firefox a year ago, I’ve never looked back since. In fact, my Windows Desktop Cleaner Wizard even suggested me to remove rarely or unused shortcuts, such as this one.

A never been used Microsoft Internet Explorer shortcut. That’s just too bad. Gotta get rid of it now.

The reasons for the switch are straight and simple. What IE users would be suffering then, pop-ups, spywares, viruses, security issues, “the” switch had helped millions worldwide to end their nightmares. Firefox does best to fend off malicious warez and improve security strengths.

Following streams of tremendous conversions and support, Firefox’s effective marketing campaigns would become the first real threat to Microsoft web browser’s stronghold monopoly since they shipped IE free with their Windows 98 operating system back in 1998. The software giant then took rigorious measures to patch and improve their browser’s security, but in the process, revealing the ugly sides of their browsers, it seems.

Tons of great feedbacks can’t be wrong. Enough to prove that Firefox is worth every single byte on your hard disk. The thing is, everyone loves Firefox and its creative marketing campaigns. Users had the chance be involved in the effort to market the products they loved, and who better to speak and spread the satisfaction than the users themselves? Word of mouth is ultimately the best marketing tool.

Wait no more alright, make the switch to Firefox now! Don’t forget to check out their extensions page for more nifty functions. For those of you who fancy colorful themes, check out their themes page and get ready to change the skin of your fox as you wish.

If anyone has ideas on how to change the default browser in MSN Messenger, do let me know. I would appreciate that! In the mean time, Microsoft marketing geeks, come and convince me and see if you could get me to restore that Microsoft IE shortcut back on to the desktop again.

Google and its services

Google had been generous when it comes to free services. Being the world’s most popular search, Google had pioneered in providing the first ever gigabyte e-mail service, disposing a whopping 1Gb mailbox at the beginning to the 2.6Gb of now. Since then, it has been a non-stop journey in terms of products and services by the company from Mountain View, California.

We might know of the more popular services provided by the search engine giant, e.g. the Google search engine itself, GMail, Blogger, Google Desktop, Google Talk, Google Earth and that should be enough for standard users. But did you know that Google is serving more than 50 services online? Amazing feat ain’t it, for a company which started in a Californian garage by two Stanford Ph. D students nearly 10 years ago.

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

In May 2005, Google acquired Urchin Software corporation which developed the Urchin webstat software. “Urchin on Demand” web service was launched since then and in November, 2005, Google renamed the service to Google Analytics and provided the service for free.

This guide intends to show the various types of statistics generated by Google Analytics, specifically in the “Executive” view, complete with screenshots from the area and descriptions of what it all means to the readers.

The navigation bar on the left generally contains links to all of the different type of statistics available in this service. There are three main types of views to this statistic, namely the ‘Executive’ view, the ‘Marketer’ view, and the ‘Webmaster’ view.

The ‘Executive’ view display statistics similar to those viewed by the executive personnel. They contain an executive overview, together with summaries to the conversion rate, content, and marketing effectiveness. If you’re not very demanding on statistics, these details will serve you good enough.

The ‘Marketer’ view contains marketing statistic on campaigns carried out by the marketing people. It summarizes the effectiveness of different marketing projects, conversion rates, keyword considerations, etc. This is good, especially for the marketing geeks to see how the products are selling, or to analyze how users are responding to a particular service provided.

The ‘Webmaster’ view provides statistics that concern the one who takes care of the well-being of a certain website, e.g., bloggers, programmers, authors, publishers, etc. It contains detailed statistic of how well the contents (articles or pages) are being received by the visitors, as well as an in-depth analysis of the visitor’s technical details – browser type, operating system type, screen resolution, connection speed, languages, and so on. These statistics are useful to me as they helps me in tweaking the website to optimize user experience.

Executive Overview

An executive overview displays a colorful image presentation of the statistics in summary. I’ll explain of what the image is telling us for each of the four columns.

*Statistics are based on the data collected on this blog from the 14th to the 30th of November, 2005.

Visits and Pageviews
‘Visits’ and ‘Unique Visitor’ defined: ‘Visits’ are tracked when user ‘A’ visits your website – User ‘A’ can make 1 or several visits within a certain timeframe. Now, user ‘A’ is tracked as 1 ‘Unique Visitor’, regardless of how many visits he/she may do.

The ‘Visit and Pageviews’ column shows you the number of daily visits (V) and pageviews (P) spanning over a month. The average value (P/V) shows the number of pageviews made by a visitor during that month. Visitors on my site makes about 1.89 visits per visit. That’s sad.

Visits by New and Returning

‘Visits by New and Returning’ column shows in a pie-chart the percentage of new and returning visitors. Well, basically, returning visitors are the loyal ones who visits your site frequently. Two or more separate visits made by one user are considered returning visits. You could see a detailed statistics showing visitor’s loyalty and recency in the “Marketer’s view”.

Geographical Map Overlay

This is a world map showing the geographical locations of where your visitors come from. Just point to the hotspots and it’ll show you exactly where your visitors are from. The larger the hotspot, the more visitor there are from that area. Most of my visitors comes from Kuala Lumpur, with 17.07%, while others are scattered accross the continental Europe, North America, Brazil, China, and Australia.

Visits by Source

‘Visits by Source’ will tell you where you visitors are led from. While ‘Other’ souces dominates the pie-chart, Google and petalingstreet.org are my prime sources of visitors, followed by sweetsweet.net and ‘direct’ (visitors who visits my website through their bookmarks or, by entering my website’s URL directly into the browser).

Conversion Summary

Conversion occurs when a specific goal that you’ve set is reached. For example, a purchase, a new registration, a download, or something that you want your viewers or customers to do when they’re visiting your site. This particular statistic shows you i) number of visits (V), ii) G1 (G). The conversion rate (%) is is the number of goal conversions divided by the number of visits (V/G). I haven’t set any goals yet and that’s why there are no data showing. Learn how to set up goals in Google Analytics.

Marketing Summary

The marketing summary shows us the Top 5 sources, keywords, and campaigns. The ‘Visit’ column incidates the number of visits from specific sources, keywords, and campaigns and it is accompanied by its percentage of ups and downs. The ‘G1/Visits’ would be the % of conversion rate but since there is no goals set, thus all data remains 0.0%

Content Summary

The content summary shows us the Top 5 entrances, exits, and contents. Entrances here means the page of which the users enters my website. In this case, the top entrance page to my website are through the http://www.alexallied.com url, followed by the Flying with Sexy Girls post.

‘Bounces’ herein is defined as a “come and go” scenario, in which the visitor comes in through one of the pages, and then left without moving onto other pages. ‘Exits’ are those pages on which the visitors left your site, or you might call it the “departing point”. The ‘Top 5 Content’ shows the positions of the 5 most favorite contents of your site. A content’s appealingness are rated by the average time spent on them. The more time accumulated, the higher the ranking goes.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is way ahead of any webstats service providers out there in terms of its simplicity of implementation and statistical details generated. It doesn’t matter if your website is big or small, if you want to keep track of your sales conversion, or you just wanna know how many visitors you’re getting every month, Google Analytics will get everything done for you. Just head over to Google and sign up for a free account!

StripGenerator is an excellent tool for anyone out there who likes to create a comic strip, but doesn’t have the skills of drawing one.

Just pop in the website, start dragging those characters and objects into the window, insert a few mumbling lines, and wtf?! You have a comic strip of your own! After that, you can even send it to a friend of yours through them!

The tool requires Flash plug-in.

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