Measure page load time with Google Analytics

Zhiheng

Phil

By Zhiheng Wang, Make the Web Faster Team, and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team

At Google, we’re passionate about speed and making the web faster, and we’re glad to see that many website owners share the same idea. A faster web is better for both users and businesses. A slow-loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.

To improve the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it’s critical to look at page speed in the context of other web analytics data.

Therefore, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the Site Speed report in Google Analytics. With the Site Speed report you can measure the page load time across your site right within your Google Analytics account.

Uses for the Site Speed report

With the Site Speed report, not only will you be able to monitor the speed of your pages, you can also analyze it along with other analytics data, such as:

• Content: Which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies?
• Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

Setting up the Site Speed report

For now, page speed measurement is turned off by default, so you’ll only see 0s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code. We have detailed instructions in the Site Speed article in the Analytics Help Center. Once you’ve updated your tracking code, a small sample of pageviews will be used to calculate the page load time.

Bringing the Site Speed report into Google Analytics is an important step of the Make the Web Faster effort, and we look forward to your feedback on Site Speed.


Zhiheng Wang spends most of his time at work building stuff so others can serve the web better. He spends the rest of his time at home fixing stuff so his family can surf the web better.

Phil Mui is the Group Product Manager of Google Analytics and has been leading its development since its early days. He has a Ph.D. from MIT and a M.Phil. from Oxford where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Visualizing geographic data with the WebGL Globe

By Doug Fritz of the Google Data Arts Team

Today we're sharing a new Chrome Experiment called the WebGL Globe. It’s a simple, open visualization platform for geographic data that runs in WebGL-enabled browsers like Google Chrome. The globe below shows world population, and we’ve created another globe showing Google search traffic.

The primary challenge of this project was figuring out how to draw several thousand 3D data spikes as quickly and smoothly as possible. To do this, we turned to Three.js, a JavaScript library for building lightweight 3D graphics. For each data point, we generate a cube with five faces – the bottom face, which touches the globe, is removed to improve performance. We then stretch the cube relative to the data value and position it based on latitude and longitude. Finally, we merge all of the cubes into a single geometry to make it more efficient to draw.

The second challenge of the project was animating the globe – we wanted it to be fun for the user to manipulate. Thanks to WebGL, we’re able to display thousands of moving points at high frame rates by using the user’s graphics processing unit (GPU) for 3D computations. Each state of the globe has its own geometry and we morph between them with a vertex shader, saving precious CPU resources. Additionally, to make the globe look nice, we took advantage of the possibilities of GLSL and created two fragment shaders, one to simulate the atmosphere and another to simulate frontal illumination of the planet.

Now that we’ve released the globe, we’re hoping that developers like you will create your own. What data will you show on it? If you’re feeling inclined, you can learn more about the data format (represented in JSON) and get the code here. If you create your own globe, please also consider sharing a link with us -- at some point in the future, we hope to post a list of interesting globes that have been submitted.

UPDATE 6:16 PM: Fixed link to the code in last paragraph.


Doug Fritz is a creative programmer in Google's San Francisco office. Doug says he likes "simplifying the complex and complexifing the simple, because in reality it's all somewhere in the middle".

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Prediction API: Every app a smart app

By Travis Green of the Google Prediction API Team.

If you’re looking to make your app smarter and you think machine learning is more complicated than making three API calls, then you’re reading the right blog post.

Today, we are releasing v1.2 of the Google Prediction API, which makes it even easier for preview users to build smarter apps by accessing Google’s advanced machine learning algorithms through a RESTful web service.

Some technical details of the Prediction API:

• Chooses best technique from several available machine learning algorithms.
• Supported inputs: numeric data and unstructured text.
• Outputs hundreds of discrete categories, or continuous values.
• Integrates with many platforms: Google App Engine, web and desktop apps, and command line.
• v1.2 improvements:
• Simpler interface: automatic data type detection, and score normalization.
• Paid usage tier.
• Improved usage monitoring and faster signup through the APIs Console.

Ideas to make the most of the Prediction API:

• Recommendation: What products might a user be interested in? (example)
• Filter RSS feeds, user comments, or feedback: Which posts are most relevant? Should a user comment be featured? Which feedback should we look at first? (example)
• Customize homepages: Predict what content a user would like to see and populate the page with the user’s anticipated interests.
• Sentiment analysis: Is this comment positive or negative? Does a commenter support Group A or Group B?
• Message routing: Route emails to the appropriate person based on analysis of the email contents.
• See the Prediction API website for many more!

To join the preview group, go to the APIs Console and click the Prediction API slider to “ON,” and then sign up for a Google Storage account.

We would also like to continue to thank our supportive preview users for their help making the API the service it is today. We look forward to seeing many more of you join us in making the web just a little bit smarter, and hearing your thoughts and feedback through our discussion group.

Travis Green's favorite part about his job is designing smart applications. In his spare time, he is in the great outdoors (looking for trouble).

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Bringing Google’s Cloud technology to Google Earth & Maps Enterprise

Our vision for Google Earth and Google Maps has always been to create a digital mirror of the world where any user, anywhere, and from any device or platform can access current, authoritative, accurate, and rich information about the world around them. In order to provide fast and timely maps to our users, we’ve developed powerful geo infrastructure that lets us process and serve petabytes of imagery and basemap data to hundreds of millions of users.

We frequently hear requests from governments and businesses - some of whom use our existing Enterprise Earth & Maps products today - that they would like to have greater access to some of the infrastructure we’ve built in order to more easily store their geospatial data in the cloud and more easily build and publish maps for their users.

Today we announced Google Earth Builder, which continues the spirit of providing more access to Google’s core infrastructure, such as Google App Engine and Google Exacycle.



Google Earth Builder is an Enterprise mapping platform powered by Google’s cloud technology. We’ve built Google Earth Builder with the idea that any organization with their own mapping data - be it terabytes of imagery or just a few basemap layers - should be able to upload and manage that data in the cloud. They can use Google’s scalable infrastructure to process and securely serve it through familiar Google Earth and Maps interfaces to their users.

Our goal for Google Earth Builder is to enable Enterprises that work with geospatial data and create online maps to be able perform these tasks in the cloud. Over time we anticipate providing access to more and more of our geo infrastructure through Google Earth Builder, so businesses have more options for how to process, publish and analyze their geospatial data. We’re excited to launch Google Earth Builder in Q3, and in the meantime if you are interested in learning more then please get in touch.

Posted by Brian McClendon, Google VP of Earth and Maps

A new test suite for rich text editing

This post is by Roland Steiner of the Chrome Team. Roland works mainly on layout and rendering for Chrome and WebKit. An Austrian native, Roland has ventured far and made Tokyo his second home. -scottk

Many web applications allow users not just to edit plain text, but also to embellish it – making it bold or underlined, adding bulleted lists or images. For example, think of online document or blog editors, or rich e-mail apps. JavaScript provides various APIs you can use to implement these apps.

Unfortunately, while these APIs are largely defined the same in modern browsers, the results often differ. To document the current state of all this, we have set up a new rich text editing test suite as part of the larger browserscope framework.

Let’s look at how a region of text, such as a <div>, can be marked as editable by adding the contenteditable attribute:

<div contenteditable="true"> ...some content... </div>


You can then manipulate the content with simple calls:

document.execCommand("formatting command", showUI, parameter)

For example, you can set the color of the selected text to red with this call:

document.execCommand("forecolor", false, "red")

Although this command works well on most browsers, different browsers implement different subsets of formatting commands, and even common commands often produce varying HTML structures.

There are other APIs that affect selection and cursor movement, or allow querying of the current state, and those, too, are often implemented differently.

Our new test suite tries to capture all currently implemented commands and APIs, and runs them on varying initial HTML content and within various containers. The suite already contains well over 1,000 tests.

We don’t want to stop there. We intend to grow the suite and incorporate external feedback and suggestions so we can arrive at a common set of editing functions. We hope this can then serve as a common reference, not only for browser implementers, but also for web developers.

To achieve this goal, we would like input from anyone interested in this topic, including those with past complaints about bugs and incompatibilities in this area.

For suggestions, criticism, and general discussion on the suite and tests, please send feedback to the browserscope mailing list at browserscope@googlegroups.com.

Introducing Page Speed Online, with mobile support

By Andrew Oates and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed Team

At Google, we’re striving to make the whole web fast. As part of that effort, we’re launching a new web-based tool in Google Labs, Page Speed Online, which analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.



In addition, we’ve added a new feature: the ability to get Page Speed suggestions customized for the mobile version of a page, specifically smartphones. Due to the relatively limited CPU capabilities of mobile devices, the high round-trip times of mobile networks, and rapid growth of mobile usage, understanding and optimizing for mobile performance is even more critical than for the desktop, so Page Speed Online now allows you to easily analyze and optimize your site for mobile performance. The mobile recommendations are tuned for the unique characteristics of mobile devices, and contain several best practices that go beyond the recommendations for desktop browsers, in order to create a faster mobile experience. New mobile-targeted best practices include eliminating uncacheable landing page redirects and reducing the amount of JavaScript parsed during the page load, two common issues that slow down mobile pages today.

Page Speed Online is powered by the same Page Speed SDK that powers the Chrome and Firefox extensions and webpagetest.org.

Please give Page Speed Online a try. We’re eager to hear your feedback on our mailing list and find out how you’re using it to optimize your site.

Page Speed for Chrome, and in 40 languages!

(Cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.)

Today we’re launching the most requested feature for Page Speed, Page Speed for Chrome. Now Google Chrome users can get Page Speed performance suggestions to make their sites faster, right inside the Chrome browser. We would like to thank all our users for your great feedback and support since we launched. We’re humbled that 1.4 M unique users are using the Page Speed extension and finding it useful to help with their web performance diagnosis.

Google Chrome support has always been high on our priority list but we wanted to get it right. It was critical that the same engine that powers the Page Speed Add-On for Firefox be used here as well. So we first built the Page Speed SDK, which we then integrated into the Chrome extension.

Page Speed for Chrome retains the same core features as the Firefox add-on. In addition, there are two major improvements appearing in this version first. We’ve improved scoring and suggestion ordering to help web developers focus on higher-potential optimizations first. Plus, because making the web faster is a global initiative, Page Speed now supports displaying localized rule results in 40 languages! These improvements are part of the Page Speed SDK, so they will also appear in the next release of our Firefox add-on as well.

If your site serves different content based on the browser’s user agent, you now have a good method for page performance analysis as seen by different browsers, with Page Speed coverage for Firefox and Chrome through the extensions, and Internet Explorer via webpagetest.org, which integrates the Page Speed SDK.

We’d love to hear from you, as always. Please try Page Speed for Chrome, and give us feedback on our mailing list about additional functionality you’d like to see. Stay tuned for updates to Page Speed for Chrome that take advantage of exciting new technologies such as Native Client.

By Matthew Steele and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed Team

Your Web, Half a Second Sooner

At Google we’re constantly trying to make the web faster — not just our corner of it, but the whole thing. Over the past few days we’ve been rolling out a new and improved version of show_ads.js, the piece of JavaScript used by more than two million publishers to put AdSense advertisements on their web pages. The new show_ads is small and fast, built so that your browser can turn its attention back to its main task — working on the rest of the web page — as soon as possible. This change is now making billions of web pages every day load faster by half a second or more.

The old show_ads did lots of work: loading additional scripts, gathering information about the web page it was running on, and building the ad request to send back to Google. The new show_ads has a different job. It creates a friendly (same-origin) iframe on the web page, and starts the old script with a new name, show_ads_impl, running inside that iframe. The _impl does all the heavy lifting, and in the end the ads look exactly the same. But there’s a substantial speed advantage: many things happening inside an iframe don’t block the web browser’s other work.

How much of an effect this has depends on context: a page with nothing but ads on it isn’t going to get any faster. But on the real-world sites we tested, the latency overhead from our ads is basically gone. Page load times with the new asynchronous AdSense implementation are statistically indistinguishable from load times for the same pages with no ads at all.

The new show_ads is a drop-in replacement for the old one: web site owners don’t need to do anything to get this speed-up. But these dynamically-populated friendly iframes are finicky beasts. For now, we’re only using this technique on Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8, with more to come once we’re sure that it plays well with other browsers.

And what if you’ve built a page that loads AdSense ads and then manipulates them in exotic ways not compatible with friendly iframes? (This is the web, after all, land of “What do you mean that’s ‘not supported’? I tried it, and it worked!”) You can set “google_enable_async = false” for any individual ad slot to revert to the old blocking behavior. But if your site loads ads in some tortuous way because you were looking for latency benefits, consider giving the straightforward invocation of show_ads.js a whirl. Because now, we’re fast.

By Michael Kleber, Ads Latency Team

Making auth easier: OAuth 2.0 for Google APIs

One of the most exciting things about the architecture of the web is how easily it supports mashups—URLs, IFRAMEs, XHR, and more make it easy to build great new services on top of building blocks from others. As more and more people use the web for non-public data, we need new techniques to secure those building blocks. That’s where OAuth comes in—an open, standard way for users to grant permission for an application to access part of their account.

Since we announced support for OAuth in 2008, we've seen tremendous usage growth in our APIs that require user authorization, like Calendar and Docs. While the spec isn't completely finalized, Google is pleased to announce our experimental support of an easier way for developers to obtain user authorization for our APIs: OAuth 2.0 with bearer tokens. Whether you use our updated client libraries or just write to the protocol, you should be able to do more with less code.

In addition to supporting a simplified protocol, we're also introducing a simpler, cleaner consent page for OAuth 2.0:


Google believes in open systems that give users value, transparency and control. We hope the OAuth 2.0 protocol helps developers deliver just that: powerful applications that make use of user data without compromising on safety or security. Check out our documentation to get started with OAuth 2.0.

By Andrew Wansley, Google Developer Team

Introducing the Google APIs Explorer

Google is always looking for new ways to make it easier for developers to get started with our APIs. When you come across a new Google API, you often want to try it out without investing too much time. With that in mind, we are happy to announce the Google APIs Explorer, an interactive tool that lets you easily try out Google APIs right from your browser. Today, the Explorer supports over a half dozen APIs – and we expect that number to grow rapidly over the coming weeks and months.

By selecting an API you want to explore, you can see all the available methods and parameters along with inline documentation. Just fill out the parameters for the method you want to try and click “Execute”. The Explorer composes the request, executes it, and displays the response in real time. For some APIs that access private data you will need to “Switch to Private Access” and authorize the Explorer to do so.

To get you started, here are some sample requests; follow the links and press “Execute”:

• Expand a goo.gl URL using the URL Shortener API
• Translate a phrase to French using the Translate API
• List your personal Buzz posts using the Buzz API (requires private access)

The Explorer makes it easier for developers to discover what APIs we offer and get started using them within minutes. If you have any questions or comments, visit the help page or the support forum. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Happy exploring!

By Anton Lopyrev and Jason Hall, Google Developer Team

Native Client: Getting ready for takeoff

(Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog)

Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client is an open source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly and safely execute native compiled code inside the browser. Today, we’ve reached an important milestone in our efforts to make Native Client modules as portable and secure as JavaScript, by making available a first release of the revamped Native Client SDK.

The SDK now includes support for a comprehensive set of Pepper interfaces for compute, audio, and 2D Native Client modules. These interfaces are close to being stable, with some important exceptions that are listed in the release notes.

In addition, we’ve focused on improving security. We have enabled auto-update and an outer sandbox. This allowed us to remove the expiration date and localhost security restrictions we had adopted in previous research-focused releases. Beyond security, we’ve also improved the mechanism for fetching Native Client modules based on the instruction set architecture of the target machine, so developers don’t need to worry about this any more.

We are excited to see Native Client progressively evolve into a developer-ready technology. In the coming months we will be adding APIs for 3D graphics, local file storage, WebSockets, peer-to-peer networking, and more. We’ll also be working on Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs), a feature that will eventually allow us to provide Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability.

Until the ABI becomes stable, Native Client will remain off by default. However, given the progress we’ve made, you can now sticky-enable Native Client in Chrome 10+ through the about:flags dialog. Otherwise, you can continue using a command line flag to enable Native Client when you want to.

A big goal of this release is to enable developers to start building Native Client modules for Chrome applications. Please watch this blog for updates and use our discussion group for questions, feedback, and to engage with the Native Client community.

By Christian Stefansen, Native Client Team

Visualize your own data in the Google Public Data Explorer

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Over the past two years, we’ve made public data easier to find, explore and understand in several ways, providing unemployment figures, population statistics and world development indicators in search results, and introducing the Public Data Explorer tool. Together with our data provider partners, we’ve curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity (OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) to population density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.

Today, we’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.

To upload a dataset, click on the “My Datasets” link on the left-hand side of the Public Data Explorer. Once imported, a dataset can be visualized, embedded in external websites, shared with others and published. If you’re an official provider, you can request that your datasets appear in the Public Data Explorer directory; please contact us to discuss this process.

With this new capability, we hope more datasets can come to life through Public Data Explorer visualisations and enable people to better understand the world around them and make more informed, data-driven decisions. Stay tuned for more datasets, visualization features and DSPL extensions in the future.

By Omar Benjelloun, Google Public Data Team

Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT 2.2 now available

(Cross-posted from the Google Web Toolkit Blog)

Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT 2.2 are now available with several new features that we’re excited to share with you. First, Google Plugin for Eclipse 2.2 directly integrates GWT Designer, a powerful WYSIWYG Ajax user interface (UI) designer that makes it much easier to quickly build UIs. Second, developers can take advantage of the modern web with the first round of HTML5 support within the GWT SDK. Additionally, GWT’s CellTable widget now offers new functionality, such as default column sorting and the ability to set column widths. These new features make it even easier to build best in breed web apps using Java-based tools and Eclipse. And while these apps can be run on any platform, Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it very easy to deploy, and run, on Google App Engine.

Instructions for installing this new release of the Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT SDK can be found here: Getting Started with Google Plugin for Eclipse.

If you’re simply looking for the GWT 2.2 SDK, you can find it here: GWT SDK Download.

GWT Designer
Directly integrating GWT Designer into the Google Plugin for Eclipse has been a top priority for us over the past few months. We’ve had some very positive feedback from the community early on, and for this release we not only wanted to provide the best developer experience when using GWT Designer, we also wanted a seamless experience across GWT Designer and GPE.

HTML5 features
GWT 2.2 includes support for HTML5-specific features, such as the Canvas element, which allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images, and the embedding of Audio/Video tags. These APIs are still experimental and may change a bit over the next couple releases, but we feel that they're stable enough to deserve some real mileage (by you). Below is a demo that one of the GWT team members, Philip Rogers, put together to showcase the new Canvas support in the GWT SDK. You can find the code for this demo here: http://code.google.com/p/gwtcanvasdemo/.

New CellTable APIs
With GWT 2.1, we found that developers were often times incorporating a CellTable widget into their project, and immediately adding the boilerplate code to add sorting, and then having to jump through hoops to set column widths. With the GWT SDK 2.2 release, this functionality is now part of the CellTable widget itself. Where we can, we want to improve the native GWT widgets, adding features and functionality that minimize the custom code that developers have to write.

If you would like to see these updates in action, checkout out the CellTable example with the GWT Showcase app.

A note about Java 1.5
GWT version 2.2 will only have deprecated support for Java 1.5, resulting in warnings when building applications. While Java 1.5 will still work for this release of GWT, developers should upgrade their version of Java to correct these warnings and ensure compatibility with future versions of GWT.

If you have questions or want to provide feedback, we’d love to hear it, and the best place to do so is in the Google Web Toolkit Group.

By Chris Ramsdale, Google Developer Tools Team

Street View takes you inside museums around the world

We’re always excited to share new Street View imagery with users, whether a botanical garden in South Africa or ski slopes in Canada. While Street View has enabled users to visit places all around the world virtually, the demand to show a broader range of popular locations has been great. Today we’re entering new territory with our experiment to take Street View technology indoors.

The Art Project, developed by a group of art-loving Googlers, is a collaboration between Google and 17 of the world’s most acclaimed museums. Select works of art chosen by these partners are now available for you to explore through Street View in Google Maps, and the Art Project site offers an immersive experience to explore museum information, floor plans, more than 1000 high-resolution pieces, and Street View imagery. Learn more about the Art Project on the Official Google Blog.

To take you inside magnificent spaces like the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, our team needed to update the way we go about gathering Street View images.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Street View imagery is typically collected using cars and we’re able to utilize the ample roof space and interior storage of these vehicles for all of our equipment. To take Street View technology indoors, we needed to fit all of the equipment on a much smaller vehicle, a push-cart lovingly dubbed Trolley.

Pictured with Trolley: Daniel Ratner, Mechanical Engineer and Matt Williams, Program Manager at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Trolley is outfitted with a few components that are key to collecting indoor imagery: a panoramic camera to collect 360-degree views, lasers to capture distances to walls, motion sensors to track Trolley’s position, a hard drive to store data, and a laptop to operate the system.

With this adapted equipment, we were able to gather the imagery and bring it into Google Maps, and you can now drag Pegman directly onto museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to explore their impressive European Paintings wing.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States

You can also enter museums when you’re already looking at Street View imagery of the museum exterior. You’ll notice new double-arrow navigation links from the nearby streets leading you inside, as you can see here for the Palace of Versailles.

Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France

Once inside the museum, you can navigate around rooms freely with the navigation arrows or simply click on a distant spot to jump to a closer view. Movement between floors can also be done with ease by selecting a different level from the new control panel below the Street View compass and zoom controls.

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

We’re excited to introduce this new imagery in Street View, and will continue to improve and develop this indoor experience. To explore these museums directly through Street View in Google Maps, visit maps.google.com/museums, and to view high-resolution artwork and learn more about the museums, check out the Art Project at www.googleartproject.com.

Posted by Jonathan Siegel, Software Engineer

Sign up for imagery update alert

Users in the Google Earth forum often ask about the age of satellite imagery and when the content will be updated. While we aren’t able to tell you in advance when our imagery will be updated, we can now notify you after new images are added to an area that you’re interested in.

With our Follow Your World application, you can register points on the globe and we’ll send you an email update whenever the imagery is updated there.

In just three easy steps, you can add points such as your hometown, your college football stadium, or just about any place on Earth. And since Google Earth and Google Maps share the same imagery, this tool is equally handy for enthusiasts of both products. Follow Your World also provides a handy dashboard to manage your subscriptions.

Whether you’re an armchair geospatial enthusiast, or you frequently use aerial imagery from Google Earth or Google Maps in your work, we invite you to give this new app a try so you’ll be the first to know.

Posted by Jeral Poskey, Google Earth support team

127 new dimensions and metrics through the Google Analytics API

One of our aims of the Google Analytics Data Export API is to provide access to all the data you find in our reporting UI. To that end, we are releasing 127 new dimensions and metrics via the API today!

Some of the powerful new data points are:

• Unique visitors - ga:visitors metric has been updated to support the true number of unique visitors for any date range (instead of the daily unique visitors). It also supports significantly more valid combinations.
• Organic Searches - The number of organic searches within a session.
• 10 new Adwords dimensions - Including Matched Query (what people searched for, not the bid term) and Placement Domain (which site you content ads were running on).
• Search Result Views - The number of times a search result page was viewed.
• 3 Time dimensions - To simplify plotting graphs.

We also included 111 calculated metrics to make it easy to query most common calculations in the reports, such as bounce rate, cost per conversion, and margin. Now, getting calculated metrics is both more convenient and in parity with the calculated metrics in the UI.

You can see a complete list of the new dimensions and metrics in our public changelog.

With all these dimensions and metrics, it can be time consuming to find the values you are looking for. To simplify this, we’re also launching a new interactive dimension and metric search tool. You can use this interactive tool to search for a dimension or metric using its search-as you-type feature. Even more exciting is the ability to easily determine valid dimension-metric combinations just by selecting the dimensions/metrics that you want to request. Here's a screenshot:

We hope that you will find this new tool and additional data useful. As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback, in our developer group.

By Jeetendra Soneja and Ivanna Kartarahardja, Google Analytics API team

See more views with the new Google Maps widget

When we launched Google Maps, we had one layer -- the map. Since then, we’ve added more than ten different ways to explore the world around you, including photos, transit and traffic information, as well as satellite and terrain views. We’ve now updated the design so that you can more easily see and switch between the various viewing options that are available.

Suppose you’re planning to meet your friend for a concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, and you want driving directions to plan your trip from your apartment in San Francisco. When accessing Google Maps, you’ll see a new widget in the upper right corner that allows you to easily select from either the Maps, satellite or Earth view. In addition, the single widget icon showcases all the different layers available to you, enabling you to quickly see more detailed information just by mousing over the ones you want.

Since it’s nearly rush hour and traffic information would be useful, you select that layer by clicking on it in the widget:

Unfortunately, the traffic layer shows that there are heavy delays along your route. You wonder if taking public transit is a better option, so you turn off the traffic layer by clicking on it again, and turn on the transit layer instead:

Ah, it looks like there’s a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station near your apartment and one near the Greek Theatre. Public transit it is! If you also want to find a local spot to grab dinner after the show, you could search for [restaurants] in the same Google Maps window. Your recently viewed searches will appear in the new widget, enabling you to easily see both your destination and search results at the same time. This makes it easy to find a place nearby.

We hope this new all-inclusive widget for accessing map types, layers and recently viewed searches improves your experience exploring and navigating to the places you want to go!

Update (11/20): Sorry for the delay, but the new widget for viewing map types, layers and recent searches will be available soon. We'll update this post again when the widget is live.

Update (1/24): The widget is now live for all users on Google Maps. We hope you’ll enjoy exploring all the useful information available right on the map!

Posted by Amanda Leicht, Product Manager

The next generation of mobile maps

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog and Google Mobile Blog]

I’m excited to announce Google Maps 5.0 for Android, with two significant new features: 3D interaction and offline reliability.

We launched Google Maps for mobile a little more than five years ago. Since then, we’ve added dozens of features, and we’ve grown from a few thousand to more than 100 million users. Still, a couple of things have remained the same: a flat, north-up map and the need for a strong Internet connection. Today, we’re changing that for the first time.

Tilt while zoomed in (left) or use compass mode (right) to orient yourself with 3D buildings.

Explore maps in 3D
Until now, Google Maps has always downloaded the map as a set of small, square images that we stitch together to form the map you see. (You’ve probably seen those gray squares getting filled in, block-by-block, as the images load over the network.) Starting today, we’ll use vector graphics to dynamically draw the map on your device as you use it, allowing you to interact with it in new ways:

• Tilting: Drag down with two fingers to tilt the map. Tilt while zoomed in on one of the 100+ cities around the world with 3D buildings to see a skyline spring to life.
• Rotating: Twist with two fingers to rotate the map. After tilting to see 3D buildings, rotate around them to gain a new perspective from any direction.
• Smooth zooming: Slide two fingers together or apart, and see the map and labels continuously scale to any zoom level, stopping when your fingers stop.
• Compass mode: Center the map on your location, and then tap the compass button in the top right corner. The map will flip into 3D mode and start rotating to match your perspective, while still keeping all the labels upright and readable.

I found 3D buildings especially useful on a recent trip to New York. From my hotel to the Google office in Chelsea and bars on the Lower East Side, this richer representation of the real world made the map much more helpful. And whenever I walked out of a building or subway station, I used compass mode to get myself quickly oriented and on my way. Check out the video below to see tilt, rotation, zoom and compass mode in action, or see more pictures.



Offline reliability
Google Maps has always been, and continues to be, a fundamentally Internet-connected experience, meaning you always get the freshest map and place data, search and voice search, live traffic conditions, satellite and Street View imagery, and much more. Still, we understand that mobile Internet connections aren’t 100% reliable. So today we’re happy to take the first steps toward greater offline reliability, so you can find your way even if you lose your connection.

In the past, you’ve probably had frustrating moments when you get stranded without a map, whether ducking into the subway, sitting at the back of a restaurant or traveling anywhere with a flaky Internet connection. But dynamically drawing maps requires 100 times less data to get maps across all zoom levels, so now we’re able to proactively cache (or store) large areas on your device based on where you use Maps the most. This way, you can rely on having fast, robust maps available to you where you’re most likely to need them.

For example, I live in San Francisco and work in Mountain View, so Maps makes sure I can always pull up detailed street maps of each city and area maps for the whole San Francisco Bay Area. When I do have an Internet connection, I still get live traffic, imagery, richer map details and all the other features I’m used to with Google Maps.

Rather than having a static set of maps when installed, Maps will automatically start caching the areas you visit the most when your device is plugged in and connected to WiFi (e.g., the nightly charge). We’re already hard at work improving the algorithms and technology behind these features, so over time you can expect to see maps work better in more offline situations.

Offline rerouting
If you’re one of the more than 10 million people relying on Google Maps Navigation (Beta), our free turn-by-turn GPS navigation feature, losing your Internet connection can be particularly painful. (This happened to me on a recent ski trip to Tahoe, and I was left trying to manually find my way back to my route.) So we’re also introducing offline rerouting. You’ll still need a connection to start a route, but if you miss a turn along the way, we’ll quickly get you back on track, even if you don’t have an Internet connection. We’ll be rolling this feature out gradually over the next few weeks.

Google Maps Navigation now automatically reroutes you, even if you lose your connection.

These new features are just the first steps in maximizing dynamic map drawing technology to create a faster, more interactive experience where efficiency really matters: mobile devices. For example, we estimate that viewing maps now requires almost 70% less mobile network data overall than before. We can’t wait to take the next steps in making Google Maps faster, more reliable and even more useful no matter where you take it.

Get Google Maps for mobile 5.0 by searching for Google Maps in Android Market (or tap on this link if you’re on your phone). Android 1.6+ devices can get Maps 5.0, but 3D and offline features require Android 2.0+, and some features may not be supported for all devices or countries.

So try it out. Wander around in compass mode, explore 3D buildings—even dare to open Maps on the subway! I hope you enjoy all the new features as much as we do.

Posted by Michael Siliski, Product Manager

Google Earth Pro 6: Measure your world in 3D

We’re excited to announce a new addition to the Advanced Measurement Tool Suite in Google Earth Pro: you can now measure in 3D!

Pro customers recently ranked Area Measurement as one of the most valuable Google Earth Pro tools, so we wanted to add more to the package. In a continued effort to mirror the real world, allowing you to lift measurements off the ground and extend them in to the 3D realm seemed a natural next step.

We think these tools will be beneficial to our customers as there are limitless applications for their use. 3D Measurements can be used by engineers to plan wind farms, real estate firms to determine skyline views for new high rise buildings, construction companies to measure the materials needed for a retrofitting, architects to calculate the space between buildings, and more.

To measure buildings and distances between buildings, just turn on the 3D Buildings layer and click the Ruler Tool icon in the toolbar. If you’re running Google Earth Pro, you’ll notice two new tabs for measuring in 3D: 3D Path and 3D Polygon.

Here are a few examples of what the new Pro 3D Measurement Tools have to offer.

Measure the height or width of a 3D building:

Measure the area of the face of a 3D building:

Measure the distance between a building and a point on the ground or another building:

If you’re new to Google Earth Pro, try it for free for 7 days or buy Google Earth Pro today and discover how 3D Measurements can benefit your business. Onward and upward!

Posted by Cristelle Blackford, Google Earth Pro Team

Update 2:35PM: The first image in this post to demonstrate building height measurement has been updated.

Discover Yours: Local recommendations powered by you and your friends

There’s something so exciting about discovering new places. Nothing beats finding a great new place I’ve never been—whether it’s a new bakery with a special dessert, a hole-in-the-wall Mediterranean place I didn’t notice before or a local art gallery where I can let my imagination roam free.

The challenge with finding those great places is that each of us has different tastes. I want to find places I like and I want to find them quickly. So when I’m overwhelmed with possibilities, I turn to sources I can trust. For example, if I’m in a new city, I might chat with the concierge at my hotel and explain to him the kinds of places I like so he can give me personalized recommendations, or I’ll ask my friends for local recommendations because I value their opinions and we have similar tastes. But finding trusted advice is hard; wouldn’t it be great if there was a way for me to get these recommendations all the time, everywhere I go?

We are trying to do exactly that, and today we’re excited to share the first step: an early release of Hotpot - a local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends. With Hotpot, we’re making local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy. There are three main ingredients in the Hotpot recipe:

• Google Places - These are the 50 million places around the world for which we have rich details.

• The places you like - When you rate places you like, we’ll tell you about other related places you’ll love. I love my favorite neighborhood restaurant in Noe Valley, Firefly, so when I rate it 5 stars, Hotpot will try to recommend other places for me in the city with simple, homey food such as Home restaurant.

• The places your friends like - Share your ratings with your friends and see the places they’ve recommended. I’m planning a trip to Barcelona for the holidays and my friend Bernardo is a local. With Hotpot, I can see his recommendations when planning my trip on Google Maps, or when I’m in Spain using Google Maps or Places for Android.

Combining these three ingredients makes the hard task of choosing where to go easy; all you need is to rate places and add your friends. To do that we created the Hotpot rating app: quickly rate all the places you’ve been to and choose exactly which friends you want to invite to Hotpot. Then, when you’re visiting places, you can continue rating on the go from Mobile maps on Android.

Rate from the Hotpot rating app

Rate from Mobile maps on Android

Your recommendations are with you whenever you need them. In search results, you can see recommended places by using the new Place Search and clicking on the “Places” filter. You can also see recommendations when searching on Google Maps, Google Maps for Android or when checking the Place pages for a specific business.

Recommendations on Place Search

Recommendations on a Place page

Recommendations on Google Maps for Android

You can set a Places nickname (here’s how) when you start using Hotpot, so you control how you post your ratings. That way, only your friends will be able to see your real name.

Happy hotpotting!

Posted by Lior Ron, Product Manager