As an existing user of both, I’m very excited by this new integration. Key benefits are:

• Your email (which is basically Gmail) is automatically linked to your contact records in Salesforce. No more adding emails manually!
• Your calendar will synch with Salesforce.
• Documents can be stored online with Google, taking care of the expensive excess data storage charges that you get from Salesforce if you exceed your allocation

I’m sure there are many more. I’m very much looking forward to doing a trial of this as I think it could be a wonderful solution for small to medium businesses.
Check out the details on Salesforce.com.

I am at the Search Engine Room search marketing conference today at The Hyatt in Auckland, New Zealand.

Especially, looking forward to the panel discussion I’ve been invited to be on this afternoon.

I’ll be posting up summaries of the presentations on the Marker Blog.

Technorati Tags: searchengineroom, search

Google Analytics is going to get even more features soon.

"First, you’ll be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity. Simply edit any of your Google Analytics profiles to enable “Site Search” and you can find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead.

We’ll begin a limited beta test of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics.

We’ll also initiate a limited beta test in the coming weeks of our new Outbound Link Tracking feature.

Finally, Brett announced the Urchin Software from Google limited beta. Urchin is a software product that you run on your own servers. "

Since Urchin was acquired by Google, they have clearly invested substantial resource in the the product development and in my opinion, have definitely scooped the entire category. The ability to track internal search easily and also handle the complexity of AJAX and Flash applications, which have traditionally been very hard to do with other analytics packages, is a huge advancement. This type of product/service requires continual re-investment in both product development and hosting capacity, and Google obviously have deep enough pockets to do both.

There are still some ongoing questions around the accuracy of the data, but to be honest, every analytics solution I have seen (pretty much all the major ones) in the last 10 years in this industry have had this. It is more that the data is consistent rather than the absolute numbers as really it is about trend analysis.

The other major question is will Google ever start charging for the service? Joel and Tim from our team met with the Analytics guy from Google this morning and he said they have no plans to charge for it, as it is great for them to sell more AdWords.

Technorati Tags: google, googleanalytics, webanalytics

Very excited that renowned Australian search marketing event, Search Engine Room is coming to Auckland on 13th November 2007. This is a must for marketers interested in understanding more about search.

I’m even more excited that I’ve been asked to sit on a panel discussion in the afternoon.

4.45pm - 5.10pm … Search and The Online Marketing Budget: How fast should marketers shift their traditional advertising spend to the web? Where should that money go? How large a role should search play? This panel will discuss these and other key issues such as: what to look for in a search marketing company?
- John Schofield, Managing Director, The Internet Bureau
- Jon Beattie, Director, Marker

The short answer to these questions are:

• Very fast!
• Huge!
• A company that cares about performance and is prepared to base their remuneration on this

For the long answers, you’ll need to come to the session.

There are going to be some fantastic speakers and I urge you to come along if you can. If you are a client and would like to come as a guest of Marker, please let me know as we would love to have you there.

Technorati Tags: search, searchengineroom