Preconceptions and the best data commentary

Hans Rosling, he’s a genius.

The way he breaks the data down into smaller chunks to completely change the story here is amazing.

This is data visualization at it’s best, and guess who’s bought the software he used to create these charts?

If you’re thinking the charts look a bit like the new motion charts in Google Analytics, it’s no coincidence.

Since Google bought Trendalizer, they don’t seem to have launched it to the full depth demonstrated above, but they are making steps to use it for a number of uses.  For example – you can use the public data available for US unemployment rates, and drill down to the states you are interested in.  You can also use motion charts within Google Analytics, and you can apply visualisations to your own data using the Google Visualization API.

Edited: August 25th, 2009

Analytics / AdWords Goal & Transaction Integration

It’s been a long time coming, but Google have now stepped a little further towards integrating the stats from Google Analytics into Google AdWords.

We’ve been able to see how much we spend on PPC, and what campaigns, ad groups, and keywords provide traffic which converts for a while now.  This is great, but it would be so much easier if you could amend your campaigns based on this information straight away, rather than switching between two interfaces.

I can’t have been the only one thinking this, because, from today, users are invited to link thier conversion information from Google Analytics to Google AdWords so that they can see their pre-defined goals and e-commerce data within AdWords.  As it takes 24 hours to update, I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing how the data is represented, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow to see how user friendly this new feature is.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how it works with Conversion Optimizer.

For more info on this, check out the Google AdWords blog.

Edited: July 2nd, 2009

Microsoft adCenter Analytics Closes

Not long after adCenter Analytics beta launched some new featured for Excel 2007, Microsoft have decided to close their Web analytics program.
They offer a list of alternatives (which incidentally includes Google and Yahoo!).
There was a strange sentence in the blog post which announced the discontinuation of the product:

“despite the end of life plan, the beta was very much a success”

Weird… they successfully determined that the project was not commercially viable… not sure I would phrase it as a success.
However, if you don’t test anything that has a potential for failure, then you limit your growth.

Edited: March 16th, 2009