Pinterest Introduces A New Analytics Platform For Business Users by @mattsouthern

Pinterest often hears from businesses who change their product and marketing strategies based on insights learned on the platform, the company stated in an announcement.

In an effort to continue to help businesses improve how they work, Pinterest has introduced a new analytics platform. The new analytics platform is said to be smarter, and capable of providing meaningful insights about what your customers are interested in.

A few of the key features of Pinterest’s new analytics platform include:

Traffic and engagement metrics: See what people interact with most from your Pinterest profile and website, and how much traffic your site gets when you add the Pin It button.Audience insights: Insight into the people who engage with your business and what else they’re into.Advice for driving further engagement: Based on how people engage with your content, Pinterest will provide advice on how to increase impressions, clicks and repins.

We’ve gotten lots of great feedback about our analytics tool, and we hope this new version helps you improve how you do business—whether it’s updating your product offerings after seeing what’s popular on Pinterest, or changing how you pin based on what’s trending with Pinners.

To get started with Pinterest’s new analytics platform first make sure you have a business account. Then go to analytics.pinterest.com to see the new analytics. For further information, check out Pinterest’s Help Center.

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Twitter Opens Up Its Analytics Dashboard To All Users by @mattsouthern

It has been a good news day if you love social media analytics. First, Pinterest introduces a new analytics platform, and now Twitter opens up its analytics dashboard to everyone.

Last month Twitter launched an analytics dashboard that was akin to having Google Analytics for Twitter. It did everything you would want in a Twitter analytics tool, such as measure the performance of all your tweets, track how many people viewed your tweets and clicked on your links and so on.

Except there was one problem, only advertisers and verified users had access to it.

That has all changed now, as Twitter engineer Ian Chan broke the news in a tweet that the analytics dashboard is open to everyone:

Absolutely thrilled to open up access to http://t.co/wcU6oj9hFM to EVERYONE. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

— Ian Chan (

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Google To Stop Showing Authorship Information In Search Results by @mattsouthern

Last month we reported that Google would be removing Authorship pictures from search results. Now it has been confirmed by Google’s John Mueller that Authorship information will be removed from search results entirely.

The decision was made to drop Authorship information because the information was not found to be overly useful to searchers, and at times has even detracted from the search results.

Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.

While it’s unfortunate to see Authorship information going away, it really should not make a difference to site owners. Since Authorship didn’t help to increase traffic to pages, then site owners shouldn’t notice a decrease in traffic going forward.

Something Mueller notes that Google will continue to focus on is Schema.org structured markup: “This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.”

Google first started implementing Authorship around the time as the launch of Google

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Google Acquires Gecko Design, Designers Of The Original Fitbit by @mattsouthern

TechCruch reports that Google has acquired Gecko Design, the firm responsible for the mechanical design of the original version of the fitness tracking device Fitbit.

Gecko Design was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Google reportedly acquired them to help with its Google X special projects laboratory. In addition to working for Fitbit, Gecko Design has also worked with high-profile clients such as Aliph (Jawbone), Dell, HP, Slingmedia, and OLPC.

Here is what the President of Gecko Design had to say about the acquisition in a statement posted on their home page:

This is an incredible opportunity for everyone at Gecko. We are very excited and honored to join Google(x) and work on a variety of cutting edge projects.

We have enjoyed working with all our clients. Words cannot express the level of appreciate we have for your support throughout the many years that Gecko’s doors have been open.

Google X has spawned some of Google’s most ambitious projects, such as Google Glass and its driverless car program. With Gecko Design on board, Google now has the product design talent to help bring life to new hardware.

Rumors have alleged that Google has been shopping around for Jawbone or other wearable device makers, but it appears that Google has instead opted to acquire a design partner used by these startups.

Google has yet to release any details regarding their deal with Gecko Design.

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Conversational Search Comes To Bing by @mattsouthern

Bing recently announced they are now offer conversational search, and it works very much the same way as Google’s conversational search. You can ask a natural language question, and then follow up with another question about the same subject and Bing will remember what you were asking about.

Here’s an example of me testing out Bing’s new search functions by asking it questions about Google.

First question: “who are the founders of Google?”

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Google Ends Exact and Phrase Keyword Match Ability in AdWords; Now Applying Close Variant Keyword Matching by @mattsouthern

At least 7% of Google searches contain a misspelling, according to a new post on Google’s Inside AdWords blog. However, people still want to find what they’re looking for even if they haven’t spelled it correctly.

That’s why Google has announced that they’re applying close variant keyword matching to all exact and phrase match keywords starting in September.

Close variant keyword matching is an intuitive way to return the correct results that users are searching for. It was introduced in 2012, and Google says advertisers have seen strong results. “Advertisers are receiving an average of 7% more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable clickthrough and conversion rates.”

These incremental increases in clicks help advertisers seize opportunities to convert customers that are otherwise missed by “Low search volume” keywords that are common for misspellings and abbreviations.

Google’s announcement contains testimonials from three advertisers. Here’s one from Stitch America:

“In matching common stemming variants such as “custom hats” for “customized hats”, we’ve seen five times as many clicks for exact and phrase match keywords. What’s more impressive is that this additional traffic costs half as much.”

Close variant matching was already the default setting for campaigns, which means most advertisers won’t see a change in keyword matching behavior. The option to disable close variants will be removed in September.

Advertisers will no longer be able to build extensive lists of misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords. Instead, Google recommends to focus on adding negative keywords–including close variants you don’t want to match for–to shape traffic and reduce cost.

In addition to improving your campaigns’ ROI with an improved click-through rate and lower cost per click, with this update Google also wants to help deliver a better ad experience for your customers.

To learn more about keyword matching options, please see Google’s Help Center article.

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