For those of you taking advantage of Google Analytics, many of you may have received an email from google this morning announcing its new features and interface.

Google’s hope is to offer more comprehensive data to those shopping cart owners that need it, and simplify the vast amounts of data available to webmasters.

The main upgrades to Google Analytics include:

1. Email reports and clearer graphs to enable users to understand data and draw solutions to potential problems.
2. Plain, straight forward language descriptions to help users better understand what the statistics mean and what can be done to improve their website.
3. Score cards that help to explain what certain statistics refer to.
4. The dashboard also has more customisable features.

In a recent update Viart shopping cart software actually introduced a new feature that allows you to integrate Google Analytics into your shop (8th point down).  For those Viart owners that haven’t done that yet - I would definitely recommend it.  Every shopping cart owner should analyse their traffic as it can often reveal a lot about where problem areas exist in a website, for example, points at which a user is leaving a website and as a result not converting into a customer.  For marketing a website online, Google Analytics is a great tool.  It can tell you where your traffic is currently coming from, what keyterms they are using to find your shopping cart and much more.

If your Google Analytics account hasn’t been upgraded yet, don’t worry, Google only started yesterday and will continue to upgrade accounts for the next several weeks.

As you may already know Google Checkout recently launched in the UK.  Google Checkout has actually been available in the US for just less than a year now and Hitwise have just made available some statistics showing how the take up of google checkout is going so far in the US.

The statistics show that PayPal received 67 times more of a larger share than Google Checkout did.  This is not greatly suprising given that PayPal have built up trust over a long period of time.

The statistics also revealed a huge peak in visitors around the period of time when Google launched a big promotion - $10 to $30 off purchases.  The same is likely to happen in the UK given that Google are similarly offering £10 off purchases of £30 or more.

While the Ecommerce Times usually fill their homepage with product reviews, current ecommerce news and shopping cart tutorials, this week they have highlighted some popular disscussions often held by merchants in their forums.

You should find this interesting as it provides an insight into what your fellow merchants are thinking and struggling with.

It addresses using shopping PPC sites as means of advertising your ecommerce shopping carts and a popular thread where by merchants give fellow forum members the invitation to rate their site.  

For those shopping carts owners who advertise with Ask.com…

Ask.com is launching a new sponsored listings contextual product.

So how is Ask’s new contextual product different from Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network?  There’s two differences:

1. Publishers will be able to set ‘page yield’ thresholds and ‘relevancy’ thresholds.  There will be levers to allow publishers to determine if they want higher paying ads or if they want more relevant ads.
2. The new contextual ads will have “very customized” interfaces such as customized backgrounds and graphics.

The Ask contextual product will initially launch with Ask’s own network of sites including Match.com and TicketMaster.  Individual publishers will have to wait a little while to gain access.

Current Ask sponsored listing advertisers will be opted into the content network automatically - so be aware of this if you’re a current Ask advertiser.   In addition, advertisers will be able to preview the new tools and features they have before the launch date; the week of May 21st.

Google has been ranked the most powerful brand of 2007, above businesses like Coca Cola, Microsoft and eBay

The BRANDZ Top 100 most powerful brand of 2007 was created by Millward Brown Optimor.  The ranking is measured by their dollar value.  So, here’s the stats I think you might find interesting…

The top 5 were:

1. Google with $66.4 billion
2. General Electric with $61.9 billion
3. Microsoft with $55 billion
4. Coca-Cola with $44.1 billion
5. China Mobile with $41.2 billion

Other companies that may be of interest to you include:

eBay at number 43
Yahoo at number 42
Amazon at number 92

Some of these rankings came as a little surprise to me, what do you think?

Google’s certainly didn’t.  Google is on the growth curve.  Google dominate search and having this power has allowed them to jump into other areas of advertising where by ’search’ is central.  Google are sure to jump into more areas as they continue to grow, but who can blame them?

Internet shopping carts have quickly developed (and continue to develop) to make online shopping completely seamless - turning online shopping, for some, the “Ultimate Liberating Experience” - Wayne Miller, E-commerce Times.

This summarises another one of the articles I would like to bring to your attention.  The article, over at Ecommerce Times, describes how and why it is possible for us to “live at a level of comfort and convenience that medieval royalty could never have imagined”.