Over at the Google Analytics blog, the value of minding your bounce rate was reiterated.

What exactly is bounce rate?

According to Google’s very own Avinash Kaushik, in a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”.- Daily Fix

Simply put, bounce rate shows how much of your traffic gets what they want from your site. Whether they stay to read more or leave as soon as they go to your site.

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Here’s how Gobala finds Google, the billions of dollars worth gorilla:

Job Title: The almighty god of the Internet

Job Scope: Decides which website goes to Internet marketing heaven and which ones go to hell.

Biblical Reference: Came out of nowhere in 1997/98 and crushed all other search gods and goddesses, rules from the kingdom of heaven (Mountain View, California). A few centuries ago, Nostradamus predicted the rise of Big G. It was foretold that Big G will crush the Devil (Microsoft) and that the people will love him. But in time, Big G will assume the role of the devil as well. Spiritual leaders are still analyzing the data on their Windows Vista. It may take some time.

Why you should cover in fear: Big G can crush your life in an instant. Therefore, you should log into Internet marketing forums everyday and see what message Big G’s carrier pigeons (so called SEO experts) bring. You may also find some fake prophets that claim to carry the mandate of Big G. They will tell you they know how to get past the system, and get a free ticket to heaven.

You gotta check out the rest of Gobala’s thoughts about Google’s own casino and charity project.

Google, IMHO, is business as usual, a stroke of genius, a greedy monster, and a fun tool rolled in one.

How about you? How do you find the Google?

Tags: AdWords, Google hater, internet marketing

Google Gadget Ventures will offer third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses two types of funding:

Grants of $5,000 to developers who’ve built gadgets in our directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, qualified Gadget developers will be asked to submit a one-page proposal.

Seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who’d like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform. Qualified developers will be asked to submit a business plan.

According to Paul G. Curran…

“There comes a point in one’s life when you have to take a stand. I’ve read that a few good sites always seem to get caught up in the crossfire when Google changes its rules. One of my niche sites (gardening) was doing OK when, wham — no pages indexed, no adsense income, no sales. Several other sites followed. Although some folks believe that Google could be suffering from megalomania, I’ve just removed them from my business model; hence my site, Internet Power Without Google.”

Anyone excited to join Paul?

Full press release here.

Tags: banned, Google banned, internet marketing, email marketing

If you don’t like using your Gmail and Gcal together, you have another option of including it on your personalized Google page or iGoogle.

Tags: GCal, Gmail, iGoogle

To augment this effort further, the CSE team has provided a page where the best among the best of these custom search engines can be searched. It’s more of like the search engine for the best DIY search engines. The only CSEs that were included were chosen in terms of quality, recency, traffic and other metrics.

If you want to get your custom search engine included, the Google Base is the place where you can do that.

The featured CSE page can be used for those who would want to improve other’s search engines by contributing.

via Google Blog

Tags: Google base, Google CSE, custom search engine, search engine

Don’t focus on getting acquired. That’s like being a single woman who desperately wants to get married. Of course you want it to happen, but 99% of the time if you purposely try to get acquired (or married), it won’t. “Stick to your knitting,” says Paul Graham, a founding partner of Y Combinator, the startup factory that funded Zenter. “The way to get acquired really fast is to not focus on it. If people get the impression that you want to get bought, you won’t.”

Instead, focus on the user. This is possibly the single most important thing for entrepreneurs to remember. “Every startup that dies fails to do this,” Graham says. “A lot of startups focus on their competitors or lawsuits, but what really kills startups is if users think it’s boring. It’s a much quieter and dangerous reason, but if users don’t care about your product, that will just kill a company.”

Check out the other moves that Zenter focused on to deserve that coveted Google acquisition.

Tags: Zenter, Google acquisition, startup

It might be weird to have more than one Gmail account, but I’m using three - one for clients, one for subcontract workers, and one for my newsletter subscriptions.

And when I was still new with using these three Gmail accounts I often encounter problems with opening one just right after signing out from another.

I kept on being led to the same account when I try to sign out. It’s like an accordion-ish situation wherein I can’t get out of that Gmail account.

However, I soon discovered a way to get around this problem - Google Analytics. How?

When I tried to see if Google Analytics does the same thing (I only have one account for Google Analytics but I created another just to see if the signing out issue will still occur), there’s the option to “sign in as a different user”. That’s it! Whenever I can’t get out of one of my Gmail accounts, I sign in to my Google Analytics first as a different user to get led to a blank sign in page.

Tags: Gmail, Google Analytics, email account

Fine because there’s a newly acquired technology that will further enhance online collaboration - its the online slide presentations service from Zenter.

Zenter is one of the startup businesses that Y Combinator has funded.

TechCrunch has it that Zenter will be performing more as a social tool for people who’d like to share their slide presentations - a task that seems to be making this new Google service an excellent Powerpoint killer?!

Tags: Zender, Y Combinator, online collaboration, PowerPoint

Now we can check out the differences between two date ranges. This would be useful for checking out if there’s any pattern in your traffic flow. But I’m sure there’s much to this feature that I haven’t explored yet.

Tags: Google analytics, date range, compare stats