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Hey everybody!

I’ve been neck deep in work (and loving every second of it) since landing the position of ecommerce manager at AVISPL, but I need to chug out a post – even if it’s a quick one  - just so I get back into the blogging mindset again.

One of the things we’ve been working on since I arrived is trying to close the loop on transaction reporting, specifically matching up final transaction and revenue numbers to reported phone and web sales.

Google Analytics ecommerce tracking was already implemented, but we weren’t recording the Google Checkout transactions – an easy enough fix, but then we wanted to filter out those transactions vs the transactions that took place on the site.

The problem was there’s no easy way to set up an advanced filter to show only those transactions that went through Google Checkout. The only difference in transactions was the length of the transaction number.

Regex to the rescue! Here’s what you do:

Go to the Goals > Ecommerce > Transactions tab in Google Analytics. In the on-page filter box, edit the filter and select regex, then add this regex code:

^\d{1,8}(\s+\d{1,8})*$

You can choose to include or exclude depending on your needs. Then simply save to dashboard and you’re good to go.

This post by David Pavlicko

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Just watched a great hangout on setting up Google + badges and connecting your website to your Google + business page.

Big Whup, you say? You’ve already got the Google + button on your site, you don’t need no stinkin badge?

Well, yeah..you do.  Here’s why.

Google Direct Connect.

Once you install this badge to your site and link it to your Google + business page (doesn’t work with personal accounts as of now…bummer), you are automagically added a brand new search feature known as Direct Connect.

To see what this is, just go to Google and start your search with +’keyword’, e.g. +cat. Here’s an example of what you’ll see.

According to Jenny Murphy over at Google, the keywords being pulled in for use are contained in the Title of the Google + business page. So make sure you optimize those business page titles, people.

Another cool feature of this is that once you click on one of the ‘plus’ results, you go right to the Google plus business page, where you’re presented with a pop-up to follow that page. Nice.

 Installing the badge on your site is pretty simple, it just requires a few lines of code. You’ll have to sign up for a Google + platform account first, then get the code from the Google + Platform developer page.

As long as you have the Google Plus button already on your site, all you need to do is add one more line of code:

<g:plus href="https://plus.google.com/{plusPageUrl}"></g:plus>

This post by David Pavlicko

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This one is for all the developers who are still pulling their hair out because they can’t get Google Chrome to refresh the page.

I’m thinking that this mostly applies to sites that have an ‘expires-header’ set, but I could be wrong. Regardless of what the core issue is – you just want to refresh the damn page, so let’s get right to it.

Forcing Chrome to Refresh a Page

Step One – Open Up Dev Tools (ctrl + shift + i) or hit f12.

Next, click on the ‘network’ icon inside the dev tools bar, then look for the gear at the bottom right of the dev tools.

You are so close to solving this nightmare now. Click that gear icon and you’ll be presented with a bunch of options (many of which are supremely cool, but let’s not worry about all of that now).

Click the ‘Disable cache’ box under the Network heading – on the right side of the page.

Reload the page - Hallelujah! You’ve just refreshed your cache for this page.

This post by David Pavlicko

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Review sites are everywhere on the internet today – local business directories such as Google Places and Superpages and social apps like UrbanSpoon and Yelp, and of course –  those strictly negative review sites like complaints [dot] com and RoR (I refuse to link to these sites). If you’re a business owner and you’re not actively monitoring your reputation these days, take a moment and do a quick search for your business name on google, then do it again and add review afterwards….or better still, see what Google’s autocomplete adds on it’s own.

Reviews, Scams, Complaints – oh my.

Even if everyone of our customers love us, that doesn’t mean the reviews being posted about your business will always represent that. It’s ridiculously easy to leave an anonymous complaint on any of these ‘review’ sites, and there are a lot of businesses that have taken the low-road and done just that to their competitors. If you’re one of those scumbags, just know that karma is a b*tch.

If the complaints are legitimate, however, then it’s time to pony up and get to work fixing that reputation before it does your business too much harm. Because unlike those days of old, nothing gets forgotten on the internet. Respond as best you can, and if that doesn’t work then go about producing a ton of content to bury those review sites past the first page of results.  It’s tough (and costly) work, but it can be done.

Offline Actions Can Lead to Online Nightmares

So the good news, if there is any,  is that you can control the visibility of those review sites on the internet to some extent – or at a minimum, at least post a response to their complaints.

But what do you do if your idiot employee does something ‘offline’ , like enter ‘lady chinky eyes’ as a description for a customer on a pizza take-out receipt?

This has got to be every business owner’s nightmare. How do you ensure that this won’t happen to you?

You can’t, unfortunately. But you CAN be pro-active about instituting a positive workplace for your employees, and help them treat your customers the way they should be treated – with respect and gratitude.

This post by David Pavlicko

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You’ve heard about Yacy – the new peer to peer search engine, right?

In a nutshell, they believe that Google (and bing and yahoo – to a lesser extent) have become the ‘gatekeepers’ of information on the internet, allowing access only to the content they deem worthy. On their site they declare:

Only a decentralized search engine technology can ensure free access to knowledge

…and honestly, it’s hard to find fault with that statement.

That’s what YaCy is attempting to be. An open-source, decentralized, peer to peer search engine that eliminates both tracking and censorship. That’s right – this search engine is powered only by the processing power of the computers that are running it.

Always one to help out the open-source community, I decided to give it a try. After clearing out some hard drive space (it asks that 30 gigs of free space be available on the drive you’re installing to – I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure I want to know why, either), I installed YaCy without any real issues. Installation took less than a minute, and I’m running a Windows desktop. It also runs on Mac and linux, for all you hipsters and geeks.

Eco-saving, peer to peer powered search may sound great in theory, but in real life it’s pretty darn sluggish to use when only a few thousand people are running it. It also makes searching for anything an exercise in frustration as the content of the search engines itself and the ranking of the sites included is entirely left up to the community of YaCy users. After 5 minutes of attempting to get a single search result, I quit. Unfortunately, it continued to run in the background for another 10 minutes or so before finally closing.

So, is there a chance that YaCy can actually gain momentum and be a small ray of sunshine to fight back the ever growing shadow of our dark search overload – Google?  For the answer, let’s check out the search volume query popularity of  ’YaCy’ during the last 30 days and see how much steam it’s gained.

bummer.

Well, that sucks. Guess we can just move on, now.

This post by David Pavlicko