PauloVie

Remember when people used to say “MapQuest it” if they didn’t want to explain to someone how to get somewhere? That phrase stuck around for quite a while after Google Maps was introduced even as MapQuest’s marketshare eroded. But lately it seems all I ever hear is “Google it.” Google Maps has seen a lot of improvements since its launch to be sure, but for everyone out there Googling their Independence Day destination, here are eight ways Google could make the experience better.

Travel suggestions

Rather not spend all your time with family? Sure you can search for bookstores in Omaha or fishing holes in Florida, but Google Maps should take your previous search history, figure out what interests you and automatically suggest points of interest. Unless you really want to catch up with Aunt Mildred.

Offline mode

Picture this: You’re on a family road trip, tunes blaring, wind blowing with the windows rolled down, and your printed directions fly away never to be seen again. What now? Your navigator pulls out her laptop only to find there is no 3G in Yosemite, but thanks to Google Gears-enabled Maps, she knows right where to direct you.

Make it more social

Location is one underutilized aspect of social networking. Services like Brightkite and Loopt are ready to eat Google’s lunch by taking advantage of location, but Google has a wealth of data it could plot: geocoded photos and videos, datelined news items that get shared in Google Reader, and soon, the real-time location of every 3G iPhone-toting soul in the world. A lot of this data can already be seen on Google Maps through mash-ups, but all of this location data should be rolled into one great location-aware social network.

More options for MyMaps

When Google launched the MyMaps feature in Google Maps last year, it was seen as the death knell for a lot of sites that had been making nifty mash-ups with Google’s API. Now anyone can make a map without knowing a lick of Javascript, PHP or even HTML. If all you want to make is a simple map of where to see fireworks, MyMaps probably has you covered. But what if it’s a map of independent coffee shops serving up free Wi-Fi that you want? You’ll probably want to include a common set of information about each coffee shop including whether they serve Danish, what kind of music they play and how good the chai lattes are on a scale from one to five. You could include all of that information as text in the description for each coffee shop, but that wouldn’t make for a very easily searchable database. Rather, Google needs to include some basic support for building better lists if it truly wants to make all the world’s information findable.

Map quantitative data

Another way to make MyMaps betters would be to include a way to map quantitative data such as household income, broadband penetration or any of the other demographic data organizations collect. Again, this can be done with Google’s API, but the masses are missing out.

Layers, layer, layers

Google’s recent addition of a terrain map is nice if you’re looking for a peak to climb, but there’s no reason to stop there. Users should be able to turn map features on and off. Don’t want to see county roads? Gone. And there is no end to the layers Google could add. Google Maps should get political and add county, congressional district and city divisions for the civicly minded. And how about more live data? Like the real-time location of flights and Amtrak trains.

GPS data

Ever taken a road trip and wanted to share a map of where you’ve been? Google Maps won’t let you do it. The service should accept GPX data from GPS devices for this very reason. And think, you could share that map on the yet-to-be-named Google Maps-based social network.

English please

I hate to be one of those people, but is it too much to ask for English labels on foreign places ?

[Roadtrip image compliments of eHow]

—
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Google Mobile Maps Updates = Lots of GPS Love
Google Maps Hangs Up on Click-to-Call
Google Offers Easy Embed Code for Maps
Custom Icons for Google Maps
Google Maps in (Almost) 3D
Visualize Recent Edits to Google Maps
AdSense is Coming to Google Maps

In case you haven’t noticed, there is a lot of discussion going on over at FriendFeed. This has created a mini-crisis for those of us that blog professionally – a lot of the best conversation is taking place off-site.

But developers are quickly coming to the rescue, and the latest is Mark Carey, who has developed a plugin for Movable Type bloggers that allows you to import comments from FriendFeed to your blog. Even better, it scans FriendFeed for all instances of your blog post and grabs the comments. For example, when this post is published, not only will it hit our RSS feed, but it will hit my FriendFeed account, Pete’s FriendFeed, Mashable’s Twitter account, and hopefully be shared by a few people on Google Reader. With the new plugin (if we were using Movable Type, but I digress), comments made on any of those items in FriendFeed would show up right here on this post.

On the other side of the equation, if you leave a comment on a blog that has the plugin installed, you can select to have that comment appear on FriendFeed as well, allowing you to participate in two communities for the price of one.

For bloggers using other platforms, a few other solutions have already been developed for dealing with “the friendfeed issue.” Disqus and Plaxo hooked up recently to enable comments to flow back and forth between the two services, while Glenn Slaven has developed a plugin that WordPress bloggers can install to bridge comments with FriendFeed.

—
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Six Apart Launches Activity Streams for Movable Type Blogs
Movable Type Now Open Source; Too Little, Too Late?
Movable Type Gets Yahoo Fire Eagle Location-Sharing Plugin
Movable Type’s New Publishing Platform: Does It Need Ad Options as Well?
FriendFeed Launches Rooms. Moving Towards Semantic Web?
FriendFeed Launches Search
FriendFeed Recommendations? Who Are You Likely to Like?

An interesting story by Robert MacMillan on the slow death of, well, newspaper industry stock analysts, amidst the doom and gloom scenario of the industry they are covering. And why is this important? As the story says, the void in smart thinking on the publishing sector could exacerbate an already bleak view of the business…”the less information that’s distributed, the less appearance there is in the minds of institutional investors,” said the ever-present newspaper analyst John Morton.

Two years ago, investors could get research from more than a dozen analysts…now there are less than half of them. Prudential cut all its sell-side analysts as it exited the research business and other firms have pruned, including Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and UBS.

Meanwhile, other sources of analysis have arisen, and the story mentions Lauren Rich Fine, the respected, 19-year analyst at Merrill Lynch who retired in 2007. She, as regular readers know, has been contributing to our site in the last few months. Outsell’s Ken Doctor and Alan Mutter, a venture capitalist and former newspaper editor who runs the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, are two well-read commentators.

Check out the best business jobs in digital media. Go here for paidContent.org Job Board.

Getting users engaged with your content can result with a sale, subscription, bookmark and return visit. One of best ways to increase reader engagement is to make sure that your site architecture interlinks related content and displays them in a way which encourages the user to click around. If the first article doesn’t result in a subscription, the second might.

A term commonly used to measure visitor engagement is the bounce rate, which is the percentage of initial visitors who leaves your site after arriving at the entry page. These are visitors who ‘bounce away’ after arriving without viewing other pages on your site. You can easily find your site’s bounce rate by using stats tools like Google Analytics.

A low bounce rate means that visitors are exploring your website in greater detail. This can be inferred to mean that they are more engaged with your content. In a recent article, Jakob Nielsen suggested that the bounce rate remains an important metric.

Given growing bounce rates, we must stop using “unique visitors” as a metric for site success. Site tourists who leave a site immediately ratchet up the unique visitor count, but don’t contribute long-term value. On the contrary, bouncers should be considered a negative statistic: the site failed to engage them enough to entice even a second pageview.

Nielsen suggested that the bounce rate must be analyzed separately for four main different sources of visitors: low-value referrers, direct links from other sites, search engine traffic and loyal users. The reason for this is simple: visitors relate to your website differently, depending on their needs. The originating source indicates observable behavior patterns.

A loyal user might visit your site via a feed reader and exit after reading a new article because he/she is up to date with your archives. A user with a desire for very specific knowledge will visit your site through a search engine and can be easily tempted to click around. A casual visitor might hit one of your pages while browsing through social channels like StumbleUpon.

The point to note is that bounce rates will vary depending on the source and hence, they should be analyzed in comparison to previous sets of similar data and not across different sources. For example, the performance of search engine referrals should be measured against previous bounce rates and not against another visitor source like Digg.

Measuring Your Bounce Rate Against Overall Site Goals

However, comparing the historical bounce rates across different visitor sources will show the value of the traffic you’re receiving. Assuming that low bounce rates result in purchases, subscriptions or return visits, you can find the best performing traffic source. The important thing is to ultimately plot the bounce rates for each source against your overall site goal.

Apart from the referrer source, several other issues influence variations in bounce rates. For example, the purpose of your website, its current design and the goal of the specific entry page. It’s difficult to determine a standard bounce rate to use as a yardstick, although analytics expert Avinash Kaushik does offer some suggestions in an excellent article:

Bounce rate is a metric you’ll easily find in all web analytics tools… It won’t have all the answers for you, but it will help you focus very quickly on what’s important, show where you are wasting money and what content on your site needs revisiting. As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.

Understanding that blogs are a little different from other static sites, Avinash suggests that a 50% bounce rate for blogs is somewhat normal and a 75% rate would be a cause for concern.

Yardsticks can be useful but as I’ve mentioned, its important to not just observe bounce rate alone but its movement and impact on a specific overall goal like conversion ratios. As you are unable to ascertain the bounce rates of your competitors or peers, you need to focus more on the historical performance of your own site and study trends to discern visitor patterns.

Are lower bounce rates resulting in more purchases or subscriptions? Which type of visitors often result in high bounce rates and are there ways to change that by manipulating on-the-page elements such as link placement? What are your high-traffic pages and how can bounce visitors from it to other conversion-friendly pages on your site?

Improving Your Bounce Rate and Getting More Page Views

There is much to write on this topic. Each website has different goals or requirements so I’ll not delve too much into details but talk about overall strategies. First of all, the bounce rate is very much influenced by what is visible to the visitor. They are much more likely to click to another page when they are presented with very relevant links, call-to-actions or information.

It’s all about optimizing webpages and connecting them into a unity which adds value for both the loyal reader and the visitor who’s coming in blind from a referral site or search engine. Assume that your visitor knows nothing about your site. Assume that they want more information. Make navigation points easy to access, position links around content.

Nielsen suggests that a 2-step program to lower your bounce rates:

1. Test your site with a group of users. Ask them to enter your site from specific pages. Get feedback based on their experiences. This will give you ways to improve.




2. Expose next steps. Give visitors actions to take if they are interested in the current page. Add links to more information at the bottom of the copy or within content.

There are many ways to orient your visitors and the most important principle is to make the links highly visible and relevant to the current page. Let’s look at the BBC, a news site which I’ve always admired for their excellent interlinking practices. Here’s are screen-shots of an individual story page. Take note of the well positioned links on the sidebar:

For publishers, the BBC content model shows how pages can be well integrated into a cohesive unit, thus encouraging users to bounce from the entry page to another. From the examples, you’ll see that content producers can include many additional links:

1. Links to feature articles with in-depth analysis




2. Links to other news articles on the same topic




3. Links to a dedicated reference page dealing with only the specific topic




4. Links to a comment section/forum to invite participation by readers




5. Links to a Back story or general background information




6. Links to a multi-media presentation (audio/video)

You can do the same for other static sites that aren’t publications. Just keep in mind that the main goal is to anticipate user interest and needs by creating web pages which continue to funnel them from the original entry page to other parts of your site.

To best achieve this, you should regularly analyze your bounce rate, while studying your competitors and testing your site with a group of users. After amassing data, implement changes to your site. Observe and see if the bounce rate changes. Also determine how it affects your goals. Finally, make changes if necessary.

If you’ve not paid any attention to your bounce rate before, try starting today. It might help you to dramatically improve your website.

To easily receive updates on new articles, subscribe to Dosh Dosh today.

This is an article from Dosh Dosh

How to Analyze and Improve the ‘Bounce Rate’ for Your Website

Social Bookmark