Ego searches on Google aren’t uncommon and one of the most recent ego searches made me notice something unusual.

Yes, that’s an ad by Facebook for the name “Mayank Dhingra”. Out of curiosity I made a random India name search and

Sure enough Facebook is upto something, A couple more random searches on Indian names confirmed it

Looks like Facebook has taken a lot of Indian names(random?) and bought Google ads for them. A SEM trick to get more traffic and signups?

While this definitely isn’t a new update it’s a useful one and I am not sure if many people are aware of it.

For those who didn’t know, Gmail now has a undo button which can prevent you from sending erroneous emails. The way it works is that Gmail holds up your email for about five seconds(or more?) before sending it and you can undo sending of email in that time window by clicking the undo button

But mind you this isn’t a default setting, you’ll have to work a bit to get this working. By default when you send an email you’ll be getting the same old message

To incorporate this change go to Gmail settings(right top) and go to the labs section.

Labs section is a collection of lots of new(and mostly useful) features that are in testing stage and haven’t been released for masses.  Look for the “Undo Send” feature there, enable it  and you are done.

Though the Gmail Blog says the time in which you can do an undo is 5 seconds I’ve found it to about 9 seconds when I tried to time it a couple of times.

So what do you think about this feature ? Useful  ? Not Useful ?

I along with a few friends from Twitter attended the Google Analytics Conversion University Conference at Gurgaon. This was the first such conference by Google Analytics in India and we were lucky enough to be a part of it. The agenda of conference included introduction of GA for begineers, sharing more about their partnership programs, advanced features, adsense/adwords integration, webmaster tools and website optimizer.

The conference had about 100 attendees(or less?) from mostly, sem/ppc background. Folks from Digital Agencies and SEM companies formed the major chunk. Interestingly enough about one third of the attendees were from outside Delhi/NCR, with people from Mumbai and Kerala forming a considerable chunk. Most of the speakers too were from outside of Delhi with Jesse coming straight from Mountain View to present at the conference.

Given the professional and business oriented audience, the content was strictly focussed around getting most out of GA and eventually how you can use it to get more/spend less $$. The thing about analytics is that everyone knows it but not everyone does it, so the conference was a good reminder that you need to actually checkout the data being captured and use it to drive results.

Jesse made his point by saying “Not having goals on GA is like being a 35 year old guy who doesn’t have a job and doesn’t know what to do with his life, no goals” . So if you too haven’t configured goals in your GA, it’s time to do it and if you don’t know how to go about it, ping  me.

Tracking Bounce Rate, Outgoing Traffic, Custom Segmentation etc were some other things that I was reminded to spend some time on. BTW Are you tracking them ?

The best thing about Google Analytics(other than the fact that it works) is that its FREE, free not just for individuals but free for enterprises. Isn’t that cool ? Another great thing is that you as individual get access to the same set of features that an enterprise gets, i.e. it’s not that the free version has lesser features than paid enterprise ones.

Is it a good question to ask if Google Analytics is free, how does  Google benefit ?
Vivek, one of the speakers mentioned that amongst other things GA drives more money to adwords. Fair enough

All in all, GA conf @ Google’s gurgaon office was a fun event with great learning and networking opportunity.Good food and free wi-fi were nice addons.

You can also checkout people’s tweets by searching for hashtag #gacu

Thanks to the guys at getgaready for organizing it.

Conference Goodies

1) GA Tooth Brush: Yes, a Tooth Brush that reads “promoting good website hygiene”

2) GA Thumb/Pen Drive:

3) GA Tee-Shirt:

Update: Here’s Tatvic’s presentation on Conversion Tracking from the conference

Hey Guys,

Wanted to share the news that there’s going to be a Google Analytics Conference under Google’s “Conversion University” in Gurgaon next month.

The speakers for the conference include

You can checkout the complete list here.

The event is completely FREE of charge. You can Register on the website and your attendance will be confirmed by email a week before the event. The invite is non-transferable and there will be no spot registration.

Here’s the agenda for the conference

Date: 8th August

Place: Gurgaon

Venue:  Google India Pvt Ltd, 8th and 9th Floors, Tower C Building No.8, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon, India.

Map: http://www.getgaready.in/venue.html

Checkout  http://www.getgaready.in/ for more details

If you know it already, good, but if you don’t, here’s the thing

Now you can also add your mobile number as one of the password recovery mechanisms for Gmail

So now there’s another option to retreive your Gmail password and what’s cool about this is that you don’t need to depend on your seconday email anymore  . I think this should make life a simple in case someone looses their Gmail password.

Forgot your password ? Go to password assistance page and enter your username/email. Google will sms/text you a code on your mobile which you can use to get back on track.

Here’s a test for the new work flow

Step 1:

Step 2:

I just added my mobile number and went for the recovery option.  Contrary to what Google says, I haven’t received any sms, though I did get an email on my alternate email account. So for now we can’t say it this option is working for India but in any case the new feature/change sounds good(and safe) and I think we all should  go for it

Disclaimer: This post is just to stroke my ego

I often do Google ego searches about my name and key words that should point to some post(s) that I wrote. The results tend to range from Awesome to WTF, depending on where my entry stands in the search engine results page.

I did a Google search for some keywords/phrases and was happy to find links to my post among top 15 results. Find the keywords and the screenshots below

1) Keyphrase: “LK advani marketing” , # 11

Rank #11 in about 155,000 results. Read the post here

2) Keyphrase: “Dev D Marketing” , ” marketing dev d”  # 3

Rank #3 in about 322,000 results, Read the post here

2) Keyphrase: “Marketing Ghajini” , # 1
Rank #1 in about 10900 results , Read the post here

Here’s a bonus video of SRK proclaiming he’s the God of Marketing

I’ve been thinking, I’ve been wanting and I’ve been trying but with no avail.

I am talking about my relationship with “Google Reader“. As much as I love reading blogs I’ve never really got too much into using RSS readers to follow blogs I like. That said, I started using Google Reader more actively a couple of months back, reading posts, sharing them and even favoriting some(do you actually go back and read what you starred ?). Things were fine till I was just following 5-7 blogs but once that number crossed a dozen, things started becoming difficult. I know, anything less than 40-50 blogs on the RSS reader is not a problem with many and some can even manage reading(or just manage) 100′s of blogs in their reader but incidentally “reading blogs” is not that only thing I do and thus have a  problem keeping track of large number of blogs and using another tool for it all together.

I happened to skip checking out my reader for a weekend(while out of station) and had a really tough time getting back following it regularly. While I was not doing any good at being regular reading post from blogs I like and the things my friends share this happened. I’ve made good friends with my gtalk and gotten it to do all sorts of things thanks to our kwippy gtalk bot. It’s been a regular affair now to check my google reader once-twice a week and to quickly glance through the new items and the way things are going I have a hunch that despite all its goodness I might just have to stop using it all together as now I can get new posts from blogs I like or what’s being said about social media marketing on twitter delivered straight to my gtalk which is nothing short of spectacular.

So, what’s your story ?

Google seems to agree with what President Roosevelt said:

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And Chuck Norris.”

don’t believe me ? go to http://www.google.com, type find chuck
norris and press “I am feeling lucky” and try for yourself