While most of the more popular Google applications have been pulled into the new Google Enterprise full-account architecture, not all have and some are still in an in-between state. (My discussion below about Google Analytics is an example.) In any event, in no particular order, and with a grain of Webdogs salt, here is a handful of notes about making the transition with four Google tools commonly used within the legal services community:

Google Analytics (GA)

Such as it is, the anecdotal information posted at the Google Analytics help forum and at Lifehacker about how to transfer a Google Analytics account to another email address appears to be out-of-date, at least as of this week at our domain. Once I made the full-account transition, my initial experience with GA was pretty much what has been described by others in the past: If you added your Google corporate email address (e.g., john.doe@lsnc.net) as an “administrator” to a profile in your being-transitioned personal consumer GA account (e.g., john.doe+personal@lsnc.net) — Bingo!, the GA profile would automatically appear in your corporate GA account.

It was too good to be true. This week, when I logged into my GA account using my corporate Gmail address, I could see all my GA site profiles listed but when I clicked to view a report for this site, GA forced me to “create” a new profile. Essentially, GA is now forcing me to re-establish all my profiles with my account. Apparently during this transition, the inaccessible old profile is displayed along with the new one, as illustrated above.

FeedBurner

This was pretty painless, actually, Google’s Feedburner provides a feed-by-feed account transfer option. Login into your personal consumer Gmail account (e.g., john.doe+personal@lsnc.net), select the individual feed, and then click on Transfer Feed. The rest is self-explanatory. You will need to do this for each individual feed in your account that you want to transfer to your corporate Gmail account.

Google Custom Site-search (GSS)

I don’t know that this works with the free version of Google Site-Search. But LSNC has a couple of paid GSS accounts, and so all we did was contact Google Enterprise support, requested that the account be transferred from one Gmail account to the other, and after a few email exchanges, it was done. The short version is this: Google clones the account from the old email address to the new one, but with one difference: As Google Enterprise support explained, “you will need to replace any references in your configuration to the old unique identifiers and REPLACE it with the new unique identifiers in HTML or web pages that use the search engines.” That’s the name of that tune.

Google Voice

There is conflicting advice on this when you search for the solution to Google Voice. As I mentioned in the earlier post on this topic, it appears that one can make a request to transfer a Google Voice account associated with your personal Gmail account to your Google Apps account. Two big ifs, here: Your organization must have completed the full-account transition process (we have not) and you will need to enter the organization’s Google Apps PIN. Since that is something we are not about to distribute openly within our organization, once we complete the transition the LSNC IT staff will be the ones making such requests for the LSNC staffers.

There is light at the end of the Google full-account transition tunnel. Just keep moving toward the light.

Other posts of possible interest...

• Making the Google “full-account” transition
• Integrating Gmail and Google Groups with the Pika CMS
• Google and the Circle of Life
• How the Google Docs integration with Pika works

• Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision
• Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering! (by Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor fame)
• Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up (by Lou Rosenfeld, co-author with Peter Morville of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)

Other posts of possible interest...

• Google Analytics "Conversion University"
• A painless way to learn basics about Google Analytics
• Web traffic as a sign of economic times
• Diggin’ data with Google Analytics

Last week Google promoted its Conversion University, an “online course” in some 25 parts for groking the basics of Google Analytics. Essentially, it is a series of topics, for each of which there are from 5 to 15 or so rapid-fire (typically 20-30 seconds) Adobe Presentations explaining how its various features and analytical tools work. For legal services and other non-profits, many if not most of the topics covered in this commercially oriented online course are about aspects of web analytics that are not particularly relevant. But for those not familiar with Google Analytics or those who have not used it for anything more than to track site visits and page views, these online presentations do offer insights about other specific tools within Google Analytics. Among other things, these brief presentations can help you better understand the data Google Analytics generates, how to filter it, how to report it, and how to understand the significance of things like “keyword searches” that bring people to your site and the significance of “site search” that tells you what your users look for once they find the site. Stuff even non-commericial sites would find helpful to know and understand.

Relevance of web analytics to findability is self-evident. That said, if you already have a close, personal relationship with Google Analytics, this is likely too basic. If not, this is a good way to start getting a groove with Google Analytics.

Other posts of possible interest...

• "A List Apart" search / usability trifecta
• A painless way to learn basics about Google Analytics
• A few more notes about the Google “full-account” transition
• Pika and the Google Search Appliance make nice

For legal services and other non-profits, many if not most of the topics covered in this commercially oriented online course are about aspects of web analytics that are not particularly relevant. (After all, it is called “Conversion University” for a reason.) But for those not familiar with Google Analytics or those who have not used it for anything more than to track site visits and page views, these online presentations do offer insights about other specific tools within Google Analytics. Among other things, these brief presentations can help you better understand the data Google Analytics generates, how to filter it, how to report it, and how to understand the significance of things like “keyword searches” that bring people to your site and the significance of “site search” that tells you what your users look for once they find the site. Stuff even non-commericial sites would find helpful to know and understand.

Other posts of possible interest...

• "A List Apart" search / usability trifecta
• Google Analytics "Conversion University"
• A few more notes about the Google “full-account” transition
• Pika and the Google Search Appliance make nice

It’s like this: Two months ago, in a different context, we observed that traffic at the California Food Stamp Guide seemed to have reached an annualized plateau of about 54,000 visitor sessions and 570,000 page views. Pretty much what we were expecting based on our experience with traffic at the earlier version it replaced.

That was then. This is now: Traffic at that site has escalated dramatically in the last two months, to 7.000+ visitor sessions with 79,000 page views, per month, which annualizes to 84,000+ visitor sessions and now approaching a million page views, at 948,000+ page views per year:

Translation: In the last two months, there has been a 55% jump in visitor sessions and 66% jump in page views. And the bounce rate now falls regularly below 1%, hovering around 0.65% most days. More people are finding it and sticking to the site.

What’s going on? During this more recent 30-day period, illustrated above, 86% of the visitor sessions were driven by 3,841 different keyword searches (the proverbial long tail). People have always been looking for help getting food stamps. But a whole lot more are now out there looking.

Other posts of possible interest...

• Revisiting web stats for the California Food Stamp Guide
• "A List Apart" search / usability trifecta
• Diggin’ data with Google Analytics
• Outsourcing your web stats

Did the effort pay off? Here’s a Google Analytics screenshot for the last 30 days, reporting nearly 4,000 visitors, 42,000 page views, an average of 10+ pages viewed per visit, and a remarkably low 1% bounce rate.

Other posts of possible interest...

• A few more notes about the Google “full-account” transition
• "A List Apart" search / usability trifecta
• Google Analytics "Conversion University"
• A painless way to learn basics about Google Analytics