3 Slick Analytics Dashboards to Monitor Your Business Website. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. If you're running a company website without an analytics dashboard, you may as well be stumbling around in the dark.
Building a viable and sustainable web presence in any industry is all about understanding the needs of your users and tailoring your service to fit their needs — how can you do that if you don't even know what your users are looking at or how they got to your website? The good news is that analytics dashboards simple to implement, and they also come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit the needs and goals of your small business. While some people swear by Google Analytics or the tracking plug-ins found organically within their specific web hosting or content managing service (think WordPress analytics), there's a lot of information you may not be getting from these sources. 1. 2. 3. Graphing Comes to Google. Google has added graphing functionality to its seemingly ever-growing list of search bar capabilities, the company announced Monday in a blog post.
Now, when users type in a function — for example: sin(x) — the first search result will be an interactive graph allowing users to explore different related values for x and y. Users can also plot multiple functions by separating them with commas. The new feature is available in most browsers and "covers an extensive range of single variable functions including trigonometric, exponential, logarithmic and their compositions," writes Google engineer Adi Avidor. "I hope students and math lovers around the world find this experience as magical as I found the graphing calculator so long ago," Avidor says. What do you think of Google's new graphing feature? Google Fusion Tables.
Weave. 5 Essential Spreadsheets for Social Media Analytics. Ann Smarty is a search marketer and full-time web entrepreneur. Ann blogs on search and social media tools. Her newest project, My Blog Guest, is a free platform for guest bloggers and blog owners. Follow Ann on Twitter @seosmarty. Social media analytics and tracking can be very time-consuming and expensive. You'll find quite a few smart social media monitoring tools, but what if you can't afford them? That's why many social media marketers and power users are in constant search of free, efficient alternatives.
Most of the scripts that run the spreadsheets are "public," meaning you can access them from the Tools + Script Gallery menu (this also means they were reviewed and approved by Google Spreadsheets team). 1. GetTweets is a simple and fast Google Spreadsheet script that lets you quickly export Twitter search results into a spreadsheet. Increase the number of results returned — up to 1,500. Spreadsheet details: Public script? 2. Public script? 3. Public script? 4. Public scripts? 5. Yahoo's New Visualization Beautifully Shows What's Happening on the Web. Yahoo has launched a new webpage that visualizes what's happening on the web in near real time — and it's totally beautiful. The Content Optimization Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.) HTML5 site hopes to show users the "behind the scenes" process Yahoo uses to match readers with content on their personalized homepage, using technology developed in a Yahoo research lab a few years ago.
While Yahoo's homepage used to be arranged by editors, it now uses an algorithm to match individual user preferences. "We can provide users with insights through the lens of the 700 million users that come to our site each month," Todd Beaupre, Yahoo's senior director of product management, personalization and social platforms, told Mashable. The interactive site optimizes content discovery, showing you what's popular for a variety of user demographics, such as U.S. city, gender, age and interest (news, finance, lifestyle, Yahoo's entertainment, sports and health). What do you think of Yahoo's visualization? Web App Analyzes Tweets in Real Time for a Record of Historic Events. If you've tweeted a lot about the Occupy movement, the Syrian Protests or the Egyptian Revolution, Twitris may have considered what you said and recorded it. Dr. Amit P.
Sheth, director of the Kno.e.sis Center in Dayton, Ohio, developed the idea for Twitter research when he was monitoring what was happening in India as the Mumbai terrorist attacks unfolded in 2008. Sheth and students at Wright State University built Twitris, a web app that analyzes what's being said on social media about natural disasters as they happen, current events and ongoing national news like the 2012 election. In addition to providing general sentiments, Twitris also pulls news articles, Wikipedia articles and other Internet data to help readers better understand a particular event. Related popular topics, hashtags, users and multimedia content — images and video — are collected on an interface that acts like a time capsule. SEE ALSO: New Chrome Plugin Gives Instant Sentiment Analysis for Twitter Search Terms.