Due to an increasing number of businesses using Google Analytics, Google will be performing a system upgrade within the next two weeks. The upgrade will aim to improve the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics.

You need not worry though, as no traffic data will be affected and there will no interruption in your data collection or processing. Reports will still be available but for a few hours, users won’t be able to perform administrative account actions such as opening new accounts, creating or modifying profiles, setting up filters and goals and managing user access etc.

So if you think you’ll need to make account changes over the next two weeks, then we recommend you do it as soon as possible to avoid any disruptions during the upgrade.

These upgrades prove the continued growth in Google Analytics and it’s good to see that they’re committed to delivering a top level service. We recommend using Analytics to everyone who’s looking to improve their conversion rate, after all ‘you can manage what you can’t measure.’ So with these latest improvements, it leaves you with little reason not to be using Google Analytics.

You’re sitting at the kitchen table with your 16-year-old son. “Listen, Jamie,” you say. “I’m tired of the way your room is always a mess. And do you realise, you never help with the chores and you’re always rude and sulking around the house?”

STOP! Hold it there a second! Let’s try rewinding that type and changing the dialogue.

You’re still at the kitchen table but this time you say: “Jamie, I know you have a date on Saturday night. Here are the three things you have to do to persuade me to lend you the car....”

Now tell me: what scenario do you think is more likely to get Jason’s attention? Well, of course Jamie paid more attention the second time around because it wasn’t just another useless lecture.

Now you’re probably thinking good for Jamie but what does his story have to do with website copy?

Let us tell you that Jamie’s reaction illustrates the ‘what’s-in-it-for-me’ factor.  When you’re writing copy, you need to get out of the “here’s what I want tell you” attitude and into the “what does my reader want to hear?” mentality.

What readers want – in addition to the merchandise or service you have to offer – is to be engaged and entertained.

One of the very best ways to avoid boredom is to base your copywriting on a story, just as we just did. Of course, Jamie isn’t really my 16 year old son, but surely you have a story you can use?  With a little thought, stories can illustrate just about any business point you may want to make.

Something we also know about readers is that when it comes to content, people read web pages differently to print. They generally don’t read the pages but scan for certain terms that tell them they’re in the right place. And what are they looking for? Headings, link text, bold text and bulleted lists.

Comply with these demands and dramatically improve your conversion rate…

We bet that the next time you’re give your teenager a lecture, you’ll think of this track… You can harness that kind of power for your own website copy as well.

As the web becomes more mobile and social, we’re starting to see apps filling voids that were mostly left empty throughout the history of search and social media. People are increasingly sharing their locations with their friends, certain apps, certain sites, and even the world.

As people and businesses share their locations more and more, you might say that this is becoming a major part of search marketing, and we're not just talking about Google.

Sharing your location has become a way of sending out a generic query, and local businesses have some tremendous new opportunities as a result. Potential customers sharing their locations mean that businesses can provide a real-time call-to-action to get them inside their establishment while they're nearby.

So if you're about to start building up your content they try adding a field to your database around lat/long (latitude/longitude). You’ll then be able to deliver content based on that location information, whether that’s news, deals, coupons, tips, recommendations, etc.

When you can get to your customer this way, you can give them more relevant content, which is what search is all about.

The use of social media has grown significantly over the past two years but new research from E-Consultancy indicates that most businesses are still in the experimental stage when it comes to their efforts.

61% say they have experimented with social media, but not done that much whilst 90% say they expect social media to take up more time in the next year. Only 2% expect less time to be spent on social media next year.

Whilst it seems most businesses are still only experimenting with social media, the future looks set in that direction.

Facebook is most commonly used in social media, with 85% of companies surveyed using it as part of their marketing strategy. This is followed by Twitter (surprisingly) at 77%, LinkedIn at 58% and YouTube at 49%.

Over 60% of respondents say that the amount of money spent on social media has increased since last year and 81% of companies expect social media budgets to increase over the next year. So whilst the majority of companies are experimenting for now, they must be seeing results otherwise why would they forecast such increases?

Do you agree with these results? How important is social media to your business?

Let us know…

A growing number of resort and spa destinations are spreading their wings and reaching a wider customer base via social media. With the help of social networking platforms they are broadening their branding efforts and connecting with potential customers that they might not have reached through traditional advertising.

World-famous mountain resort company Vail Resorts now pours 80% of their marketing budget into a social media strategy. With this, the company has launched three new websites each with their own Twitter account. Each website targets a slightly different audience but the one thing everyone shares is a love for skiing and snowboarding and now Vail Resorts has provided an outlet to keep everyone updated with their news and events.

‘The Canyons’ began using social media two years ago by launching an employee-run blog in conjunction with Twitter and Facebook accounts. They began to understand the power of social media when they held a contest giveaway on Facebook. Overnight their number of fans grew so quickly that they started to think about more social media strategies.

Vail Resorts, ‘The Canyons’ and many other resorts are now realising that social media is the only realm where anyone can do effective branding. With advertising space, you’re limited by size and cost whereas with social media you can actually talk about all things relevant to you, as much as you want and for very little cost.

The click of a mouse may now be just as powerful, if not more so, than word of mouth but just don’t forget that successful social media strategies do require dedication and consistency.

When it comes to quality versus quantity, quality should always take precedence. ‘The Canyons’ take on social media was growing with substance and that’s more important than growing in numbers, because numbers don’t guarantee staying power. Whilst you want a lot of online followers, you only really want to communicate with people who are genuinely interested in using your service.

Above all, know your audience. Like with any individual or company leveraging social media, resort owners must accept that they’re no longer in complete control of their brand. However, research and attention to detail goes a long way in monitoring how a business is perceived.

Twitter is testing an ad platform, which is expected to be released next month. When the product does launch, it will be made clear when sponsors have paid for ads, and the ads themselves will be "relevant and useful, so the user doesn't think of it as an ad."

Twitter recently released a Super Bowl Chart that showed people tweeting throughout the game about the game itself and tweets about specific advertisers.

Following this, it is possible that Twitter's ad platform will tie into this "what people are already talking about" kind of thing, but that would seemingly make it much more difficult for a lesser-known brand to have any kind of advertising success.

At the moment nobody knows exactly how Twitter is going to present its ads yet but the question is - how will they do it in a way that users won't think of it as an ad?

We think it's probably going to involve some real-time engagement on the part of the advertiser, which leads us to wonder how is this different from any other unpaid, branded tweet?

That could be a difficult problem to address, one that we’re sure Twitter won’t have ignored, so if they're planning on launching next month - they must have a pretty good solution.

A new report entitled, "Beyond Trust: Engaging Consumers in the Post-Recession World," has revealed the top performing brands in the U.S. based on "trust" and "recommendation.”

The report explored the relationship between consumers and brands, emphasising the importance of ‘trust’ in these economically challenging times. The fact is: consumers will not spend their hard-earned money on brands they don’t trust.

The most trusted brand in each of the 22 countries was nearly seven times more likely to be purchased from, as consumers were 10 times more likely to have formed a strong bond with these brands.

The results were as followed:

1. Amazon.com - 123
2. FedEx - 122
3. Downy - 120
4. Huggies - 120
5. Tide - 120
6. Tylenol - 120
7. Toyota - 119
8. WebMD - 119
9. Pampers - 118
10. UPS (United Parcel Service) - 118

The scores were calculated by looking at responses to the following questions, "how trustworthy is this brand?" and "would you recommend this brand?" The average score was 100, and anything over 105 is considered good.

How do you think you would score?

A Facebook Page can be a great way to build your fan-base, engage with your customers and generally build upon your brand. However, if you want to run a promotion on Facebook, that’s going to cost you.

Facebook's policy says that you must get written approval from a Facebook account representative and in order to get one, you’ll have to spend about £6,000 advertising with the company.

So basically, without violating any guidelines, you’ll only be able to advertise by paying for Facebook ads. The guidelines state: "You may not administer any promotion through Facebook, except that you may administer a promotion through the Facebook Platform with our prior written approval."

"The business model, with pages, is to try to get as many people using them as possible, then make a little money from each person if they want to do paid advertising — the preview fee goes against this model to try to keep Facebook legally safe," writes Eldon. "The problem, as many people trying to build promotions for Facebook have been discovering on their own, is that the fee requirement is never clearly spelled out. And, neither is the rationale for the fee. The result is confusion among marketers and developers trying to build promotions for Facebook, especially for small-business clients."

You’ve probably noticed us talking about Facebook being a great way for your business to engage with your customers and increase your conversion rates. So this post probably may not be particularly encouraging. The thing is many businesses are still trying to figure Facebook out so it’s important for you not to miss guidelines like this.

It’s been splashed all over the web for weeks now, so we thought you might just be wondering what this buzz about Google Buzz is all about. Well, Buzz is Google’s new product that is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It’s integrated with Gmail and other Google products and it has been called Google’s 'missing link' in tying Google together as a social network.

So what does it do?

•    Buzz will show you a thumbnail of a YouTube video and make it easy to play
•    It features a custom photo viewer which lets you flip through enlarged thumbnails of pictures quickly
•    If you share links, it will automatically fetch headlines and photos from the post (similar to Facebook)
•    You can "like," "unlike" and expand comments

Buzz may benefit your business as an organisational tool or as a way to communicate even more with existing contacts. The idea is that when you see what your Gmail contacts are saying, it will not only keep those people fresh in your mind, but it can encourage further communication. And this could possibly lend to better organisation of your communication, which could in turn save you time.

Depending on how many of the possibilities actually happen, Google Buzz could become a central place for that communication. The more services Buzz gets integrated with, the better it could become for organisation.

So now you know, why not take try it out yourself? Google co-founder, Sergey Brin says he wrote an opinion piece, posted it to Google Buzz, and quickly had 50 comments, and edited based on feedback. Easy for a Google co-founder to say! We’d much rather hear your opinions, so tell us. Let us know what you think of Buzz…

*Every £1 invested in improving your website's usability returns £10 to £100 (source: IBM)*

Web usability is about making your website in such a way that your site users can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently. A usable website can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business.

First thing, your website has to be easy to navigate. Imagine your website as the inside of a supermarket, people expect to buy their lottery tickets by the door and they expect to go to the back shelves for their milk and bread. So make sure, your site isn’t too different as you don’t want your visitors to feel lost and then leave as a result.

You also never want to restrict your users navigating through your supermarket in the way that they want to. Did you know that every time a link is opened in a new window the back button is disabled? Did you also know that 60% of Web users employ the back button as the primary means of navigation?

Therefore if you do this then you're preventing 60% of your users from using their primary navigation. Imagine if 1000 people came to your supermarket but 600 of these couldn’t go back to that bar of chocolate they just walked past in isle 2. Do you think that these visitors are going to use your store again? We think not.

There are lots of other ways that websites can place restrictions on its users, ultimately damaging their usability - can you think of any more? Just think back to the last time a website really infuriated you and what annoying thing did it do to make you feel that way? Then look at your own website and check you’re not doing anything similar.