Facebook continues to expand its offering on a monthly basis with recent releases like the Open Graph and “Like” button. They are now turning their attention towards local marketing. As with all of Facebook’s new initiatives, most of the online chatter is asking how Google intends to combat this and, more importantly, how it will position itself as a leading social decision making engine.

There is no doubt Facebook will put Google under pressure, but a lot of the claims regarding Google’s demise are wide of the mark. Although Google is losing market share to Yahoo and Bing, we shouldn’t forget along with their search dominance, they also have a 98% share in mobile and are banking on location based marketing for mobile being a considerable revenue stream.

In relation to search, there has been a lot of misinformation recently on how Facebook, Twitter and other social metrics are affecting search results. There is no evidence of metrics from these properties being used in the main algorithm however they may use social metrics when applying their QDF algorithm. Dave Harry has some great information on this subject in the post “The Evolution of Ranking Signals: Google is Getting Past the Link”. It discusses how Google can move towards behavioural data and social data. If the search engine results are based on those areas it becomes more difficult to rank a website based on spam tactics. You are not going to spam yourself (behavioural) and will not build a network of obvious spammers (social).

Google has its own social graph through user’s Google profile which, if connected to their Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and friend feed accounts, provides Google with plenty of social content which can then use to enhance a person’s search results. These ‘social results’ were rolled out recently in Google US and Google UK but are still in beta.

Alongside Google’s own social graph, it already has a wealth of information on users’ online behavior and tastes through their past search history. Personalised search means results are no longer the same for each user. They now include Google Maps, Google Places results, tweets, and forum results, all relevant to the user who is searching.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, explains that Google already roughly ‘knows who you are and where you are’, and from past searches what you like. Google’s goal is not to simply return a list of the best results for a given search, but to tell you ‘what you should be doing next’.

Google’s mass roll out of personalised search is having a dramatic affect on both keyword positions and overall website traffic. Google recently announced they would provide more data in the Top Search Queries, making it a lot easier to track fluctuations in organic search positions.

The tool will now provide impressions and click through rates for those keywords driving organic traffic to a website. It will allow users to track how their keyword positions change on a weekly basis and what effect this is having on organic traffic to their website.

The new data highlights the importance of page title and meta description in driving free clicks to a website. Looking to the best performing PPC ad groups is a great way to optimize a websites organic listings.

Hot on the heels of Google Analytics Intelligence, Google has now added another really cool feature Annotations. This is another great addition and makes it easier to share collaborative knowledge around change in traffic patterns. Annotations allow users to add notes against stand out traffic patterns.

If you are a large company that has multiple departments, trying to work out what caused a spike or dip in traffic can be a real pain. Now you can have one standard login and allow teams to add notes against relevant dates. This will allow you to match up any online or offline activity against changes in traffic. Pretty cool !!!

An interesting new feature on comScore is ‘segment analysis’ which allows us to look at online behaviour based on usage weight.

As with ATL, the three categories are heavy, moderate and light, with definitions based on the following:

The 20% most active consumers in that category will be classified as HEAVY, the next 30% will be classified as MEDIUM and the remaining 50% will be classified as LIGHT.

The headline stat from the Irish panel analysis is that heavy users are online for 5 times longer (149 minutes per day) than light users and view 17 times more content (230 pages on average).

A full breakdown is on the table below (click to enlarge):

Google Analytics introduces another top feature this week – “Analytics Tracking for Flash”. Although Google Analytics did already provide some functionality around tracking flash events using the videoTracker object, this new offering will let publishers track metrics for their Flash applications from within Google’s popular stats package. This opens up a host of possibilities in the way advertisers pay for engagement rather than simple clicks and views.

For more info check out http://analytics.blogspot.com.

Google Analytics provides you with a wealth of data straight out of the box. But it also provides you the with the flexibility to build upon the data you get back using advanced filters and custom hacks. In this blog post we talk about one used by Cybercom to extract important information for regional search engines.

For example, you may be a company who has significant traffic coming from Tesco’s website. You will want these search engines listed in your report and also a list of search terms used by those visitors. First you need to do a search on the Tesco website. We then need to capture this data in the GATC code as follows (please note full GATC code is not shown):

<script type = “text/javascript”>
  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-12345-1″);
  pageTracker._addOrganic(“tesco.net”,”q”);
  pageTracker._initData();
  pageTracker._trackPageView();
</script>

The function addOrganic simply appends this search engine to the default list of organic search engines contained in the GATC. You can continue to add search engines in this manner.

When it comes to adding regional search engines you may try the same and add the following line:

pageTracker._addOrganic(“google.ie”, “q”);

But this will not work. The reason is that addOrganic adds all lines to the bottom of the organic search engine list. So any traffic for google will be assigned to the first entry for google in the list, ie. google.*

The answer to this is to use another function called clearOrganic, which clears the list of organic search engines and allows you to build a new list.

pageTracker._clearOrganic() // clear the default list of search engines
//New organic search list
pageTracker._addOrganic(“google.ie”, “q”);
pageTracker._addOrganic(“google.co.uk”, “q”);

But rather than define a big list in your GATC code, you can simple create a custom file and call this from your GATC code

<script src=”example_list.js” mce_src=”example_list.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

So that is how you create a custom list of regional search engines. It should be noted you cannot do this for Yahoo regional search engines due to their domain structure “uk.search.yahoo.com”.

Stay posted for more Google Analytics tips and tricks over the coming months.