Amazon recently announced an entire blog dedicated to its “Amazon Stores” feature, which made us think it’s the right time to give this brand outpost more thought. Amazon Stores is an interesting concept in that advertisers, who are historically faceless and arguably commoditized on Amazon now have the opportunity and a dedicated space within this vast site to tell shoppers why their brand is one worth remembering.

At the surface, this seems like a fantastic, benevolent move by Amazon, and it’s a great opportunity for individual brands or even multi-brand retailers to tell their story to one of the largest shopping audiences in the world.

But it doesn’t come without effort, and there are real tradeoffs to consider.

Should I Set Up An Amazon Store?

If you aren’t currently selling your products on Amazon and you can barely wrangle the content on your website and your paid, owned, and earned channels, you should probably stop there until you get those aspects of your digital presence in a solid place.

If you feel like you do have a good grasp on your content already and want to use your resources to expand your brand name via Amazon, we definitely recommend looking into Amazon Stores. These multi-layered mini websites are free, self-controlled, and fairly easy to create. They roughly mirror the merchandising and positioning opportunity of a brand’s own site, and much like a good branded e-commerce site, they offer the ease of a streamlined online shopping experience.

Considerations and Guidance If You’re Going to Create an Amazon Store

You MUST Put Time and Thought Into It

If you decide to create an Amazon Store, it’s yet another place you have to build a thoughtful presence. And developing the right positioning and messaging for any specific channel takes time and effort.

This is not a place to copy and paste the masthead paragraph from your home page. Nor should you put an intern to the task of imagining what this new store should look like.

Many brand owners fall into the trap of thinking I must be on this platform just because it exists, even if I don’t have time to manage it. Think about social media. How many businesses have you seen create a Facebook page only to stop publishing for months on end? Oftentimes, these are businesses that shouldn’t even have a Facebook page in the first place. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Facebook updates from my dentist. I go twice a year and that’s all the contact that I need.

The same thing applies to Amazon Stores. Just because everyone’s doing it, doesn’t mean you should jump on the bandwagon. Make sure it makes sense for your brand, that you already have enough products on Amazon to make this worthwhile, and that you have the bandwidth and resources to properly create your store.

As a marketer or business owner, there’s a lot to accomplish every single day. Adding more content creation and ongoing upkeep or governance into the mix could be more than your team can realistically handle right now. Or worse, you may stretch yourself too thin to get this new platform launched and let overall quality suffer. That’s certainly not a guarantee, but it’s a real consideration.

If creating an Amazon Store lines up with your business goals and it’s high on your priority list, consider doing the following before you set out:

• See if your competitors have Amazon Stores
• Research other brands’ stores. To determine if a brand has an Amazon store, go to https://www.amazon.com /brandname. For example, https://www.amazon.com/Guess/. Note: Currently, there isn’t a way to find these just by browsing
• Meet with your team and determine how many resources you will need
• Estimate how much time setting up and maintaining the store will take
• Evaluate whether you have the expertise to optimize this content for user experience and discoverability in-house, or if you’ll need an agency partner

Be realistic about what you can accomplish. Building a store may look simpler than it actually is. You don’t need to have any coding skills, but if you want to do it well, it’s not as straightforward as plugging in a few images and product descriptions.

Create Unique Content

Content and SEO 101: It’s important that you create unique content for your Amazon Store.

Beyond concerns about accidentally causing Amazon to outrank you for your own brand terms (more below) one of the big reasons unique content is a requirement here is that Amazon has certain rules for Brand Stores as well as individual products, and how they evaluate content.

In order to maintain consistency across a huge number of businesses clamoring to sell within their marketplace, Amazon imposes strict guidelines on what you say, how you say it, and where you say it. Just like any setup of an online marketplace, you have to think about strict page templates, unique fulfillment considerations, and any specific user guidelines.

According to an article on Digiday about the challenges of selling on Amazon, one marketer expressed the following concern:

“There are mixed feelings at the top whether we use it as a customer brand awareness platform. One thing is photography. To put a product on Amazon, we have to reshoot it specifically for them.”

At first glance, it may seem easy to upload a few product photos, but be cautious that you’ll need to build in extra time to do it within Amazon’s guidelines.

Duplicate Content and Amazon Stores

Another reason why you want to create unique content is to avoid duplicate content issues. If you’re a marketer strapped for time, it would be easy to take copy from your website and paste it into your Amazon Store, but this is a not a good idea.

Requisite PSA for folks reading this post who are totally unfamiliar with SEO: duplicate content is bad. To grossly oversimplify, if a search engine sees duplicate content on two or more sites it has to make a decision about which site to show in search results. Or worse, the search engine could perceive malicious intent from the duplicate content and actually penalize the site they perceive to be in the wrong. For more on this, here’s a great exploration of duplicate content considerations.

Chances are that you don’t have a higher domain authority than Amazon. This means that for any search (non-branded OR branded) there’s a risk that Google will show a link from Amazon, leaving you suddenly competing against yourself in the SERPs.

Think About Which Parts of Your Brand Story to Tell Fast-Moving Shoppers

If executed correctly, Amazon Stores allows you to tell your brand story in a way that you weren’t previously able to on the platform.

It also gives you the time and precious real-estate to tell your brand story in an otherwise transactional environment, and to provide those conversion points a little lower down the page. However, It’s important to think about what aspects of your story are actually going to hook consumers who are looking to purchase a product immediately.

For example, will your brand story tell users why your product is higher-quality or more reliable or will it tell a compelling personal story?

Let’s look at TOMS as an example:

Their backstory is a huge part of their brand and why people would buy their shoes vs. a competitor’s. Their Amazon Store allows them to both tell consumers what they’re about, as well as merchandising their products without rushing to get the conversion.

Again, notice that TOMS doesn’t just dive into the products right away. You have to scroll through some of their lifestyle and positioning imagery before you get to the individual products.

This isn’t a prescription, but it’s a good lesson. You need to think through what specific facets of your brand make sense to showcase in this specific channel.

What route you choose to go will likely depend on whether your brand is well-known and whether you have a truly compelling story behind it. Not everyone has such a feel good, purposeful marketing story as TOMS. But that’s okay. If your biggest differentiator is that you have high-quality products that far outlast your competitors’, then you should showcase that in your Amazon Store. Reading reviews that discuss product details such as durability and other parts of product quality is commonplace on Amazon, so telling a story with that angle could really work in your favor.

Before diving too deep into how you want to tell your story, we recommend starting at a few of the following places:

• Your products.

Determine which products you want to highlight and include in your store

• Your competitors’ related products.

Look at your competitors and determine whether or not they have a store. If so, how are they writing about their products and their brand?

• Common questions.

Determine what questions real shoppers are asking and then answer some of those questions in the copy in your Amazon Store. These questions indicate what customers care about

Pro-Tip: You MUST Properly Label and Organize Your Navigation

We advise most of our clients who sell on Amazon to not use a standard eCommerce navigation in their Amazon Store. You should avoid “Solutions” “Products,” “Wholesale,” etc. Amazon is singularly focused on selling products and your navigation should reflect that.

At Portent, we often talk about the importance of descriptive navigation. For example, if your site sells yoga gear, it’s better to label your navigation “yoga gear” than “products.” This not only helps with SEO, it makes for a richer, more intuitive user experience on your website.

Although we can’t claim to know whether navigational labels affect Amazon’s A9 search algorithm, it still makes for a better and more intuitive user experience.

This may be tough to visualize in writing. Let’s take a look at another example from Listerine:

Their navigational labels are clear and to the point, which makes it easy to browse. Users know exactly where they’ll land when they click on “Floss.”

Notice that their Amazon Store’s navigational labels are different than their website’s. For example, instead of having a label for “Products” or “Gums & Gum Disease,” they have labels such as “Classic Mouthwash” and “Extra Benefits Mouthwash,” which showcases the products and gets right to the point.

You can also use your navigation to push seasonal products.

Maybelline created a seasonal nav label for Halloween called “Halloween Looks.” From there, they were able to create an immersive online shopping experience that not only featured products, but step-by-step directions on how to do your makeup for Halloween.

However, it’s important that you update your navigation. At the initial time of writing this blog post, they still had the Halloween nav item up, some days after the relevant window had passed. Make sure that if you change your store seasonally, you don’t set it and forget it!

Conclusion

It’s impossible to ignore Amazon’s reach and the potential business you can bring in for your brand. However, that doesn’t mean that creating another brand outpost (an Amazon-based microsite with your own copy and content) is right for everyone. We hope you’ll carefully consider some of the points above about what it takes to get this brand outpost “right” before making a decision. And of course let us know if you decide to create an Amazon Store for your brand and want to share that experience in the comments.

The post Amazon Stores: Benefits and Tradeoffs to Building One For Your Brand appeared first on Portent.

How To Set Up Your Facebook Pixel For Beginners In 2019 | Easy Facebook Pixel Tutorial Not sure what the Facebook Pixel is? Need a quick tutorial to help …

I have this friend. Some neanderthal hacked their site and sprayed spam links all over their blog, 2008-style.

So this friend had two problems:

1. Find all the spam links
2. Detect new spam links as they occur

 I  My friend came up with a relatively simple process using ScreamingFrog. Here it is:

Yeah, yeah, it was us. I won’t detail how. It’s embarrassing, and I don’t want to get beat up on the nerd playground.

This process uses Screaming Frog. You can use another crawler, but Screaming Frog is a bucket of awesome.

The Process

Here’s what you’ll do:

1. Crawl your site
2. Clean up the bad links
3. Do a “clean crawl”
4. A few days/weeks later, do a new crawl and compare that to the previous one, looking for new, suspicious links
5. Repeat 2 and 3

Step 1: Crawl

First, crawl your site:

1. Open Screaming Frog (I know, I know, it’s obvious, but I like to be comprehensive in my step-by-step).
2. Click Configuration >> Spider
3. In the “Basic” tab, uncheck “Check Images,” “Check CSS,” and “Check JavaScript.” Uncheck “Check SWF,” if you’re still using Flash. But you’re not, right? Your Spider configuration should look like this:
   

   

4. Make sure ‘Follow External “nofollow”’ is not checked.
5. Optional: If your site has tens of thousands or more pages, and your computer has a solid state drive, consider going to Configuration >> System >> Storage and switching to Database Storage.
6. Start your crawl. If you have a big site, have a coffee or something. Your computer’s fan may start to shriek in protest. It’s OK. Just keep a fire extinguisher handy.
7. Set up an exclusion filter. See “Set Up An Exclusion Filter,” below.
8. Save the completed crawl. Your computer worked hard. It’s the least you can do.

Set Up An Exclusion Filter

Most crawls generate a long list of external links. You can make life easier by filtering out links to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. In theory, links to those sites are legitimate. A good filter is a sanity-saver. It can reduce the list of links you have to review by 70–80%. Screaming Frog has a handy exclusion tool for that very purpose.

1. In Screaming Frog, click Configuration >> Exclude
2. Type whatever URLs you want to exclude

Screaming Frog’s filter uses regular expressions. Here’s what our regex genius, Matthew Henry, came up with:

https?://(?:[^/.]+.)*domainname.com/.* will filter www.domainname.com and domainname.com.

For example, https?://(?:[^/.]+.)*twitter.com/.* filters out https://www.twitter.com/whatever and https://twitter.com/whatever

Here’s how the exclusion filter looks once you’ve entered a few domains:

You can use the “Test” tab to see whether your filter works.

You can see our filter list here. If you want to, download it, copy it, and paste it right into the Exclude field. Note this list is perfect for us, but you’ll need to customize yours over time. Or live with a less-relevant exclusion filter based on our outgoing link profile.

Save your exclusion filter!!! You’re going to run regular crawls. Save the filter. Don’t lose it.

What You’ve Got

With the crawl complete, you’ve got a complete list of external links, minus the filtered domains. Click the “External Links” tab, and you’ll see something like this:

Time to get to work.

Step 2: Clean Up The Bad Links

You’re going to have to look at all those links.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that’s hellaciously tedious. We tried all kinds of automation. None of it was accurate, and we need as close to 100% accuracy as possible. We forged ahead. You will, too.

Don’t give up. After this first cleanup, you can automate detection.

1. In the External Links tab, clean things up a bit. Look to the right of the column labels. Click the “+” sign.
2. I always uncheck “Content,” “Status,” and “Crawl Depth.” It makes skimming through the links easier and keeps your exports cleaner.
   

   

3. Start scrolling through the list of links.
4. As you scroll, look at the info pane at the bottom left of Screaming Frog.

The info pane shows the link type, the source page, and the target. It also shows (and this is important) the anchor and ALT text. Look at those, and the spam jumps out at you. Look at this example:

That’s a link from the HTML version of Conversation Marketing. It points to Cooper.com. The anchor text is “Cooper.com.” I was suspicious, but a glance at the “from” page showed it was legit. We sifted through all the links, looking for:

• Moronic anchor text
• Links to irrelevant content. You can usually figure that out by looking at the source and destination URLs
• Links to SEO agencies we didn’t recognize

By the way, if you’re an SEO agency, don’t hack other marketing companies’ sites for links. It’s like jacking a police car full of angry, mace-bearing trainees all anxious to prove themselves. There are only a couple of endings. None are good for you. The only reason I’m not listing you all in this post and subscribing your webmaster address to every porn site on the internet is the very, very slim chance someone else placed these links.

When you find a spam link, note the “From” page. That’s the linking page on your site—you’ll go there to delete the link. Now, remove all those links! It’s very satisfying.

Examples

Here are three of the links we caught, and why:

• A link to another SEO agency pointed at www.agencyname.com/seo-[city] page with the anchor text “SEO-[cityname]” from a 2014 blog post about SEO analytics. It made zero sense. That was easy.
• A link to a greeting card company (?!!!) from a blog post about digital marketing strategy to the “leaving cards” page on their site with the anchor text “leaving cards.” Okaaaayyyy.
• A link to an SEO agency with the anchor text “[city in Australia] SEO.” I’m sure [city] is beautiful, but we’d use better anchor text than that if we suddenly decided to start reviewing Australian SEO agencies.

Why Not Use Link Data?

You can use the link metrics provided by tools like Moz, ahrefs, and Majestic to score the spamminess of a link. That can save you oodles of time, and we tried it. We discovered that many of the target pages appeared legitimate — for example, one of the links we found pointed at a site with a spam score of 1%.

If a spam link points at a perfectly normal page, link metrics won’t flag it.

Step 2a (Optional): Update Your Exclusion List

If you find many external links to a single legitimate domain, add that domain to your exclusion list. It’ll make future crawls and reviews easier, and keep crawl files under control.

After our first review, we copied all domains we knew were OK, used some search-and-replace, and added those domains to our exclusion list. It cut the next crawl export in half.

What You’ve Got

You now have a clean site. You can do a clean crawl.

Step 3: Run and save another crawl

Now, run another crawl using the same exclusion filter. You saved the filter, right?

Once the crawl’s done:

1. Clean things up a bit. Look to the right of the column labels. Click the “+” sign.
2. Uncheck everything except “Address.”
3. Click the “Export” button. It’s next to the Filter drop-down. Save the result.

I convert the result from a csv to a text file. It’s a one-column list. Why get complicated?

You’ll compare your next crawl to this one and never, ever have to hand-review thousands of links again.

Step 4: Run A New Crawl And Compare

Run a new crawl and save it, just as you did in Step 3. I keep my old crawls and organize files by date. Compulsive. I know.

Now for the fun part! You’re going to compare the most recent crawl to the new one, looking for new links. Don’t fret — you don’t have to do this by hand. While computers suck at finding spam links, they excel at finding differences between files.

Tons of tools let you compare files. If you want something simple, I like Mergely.

Here’s what a comparison of the last and latest crawls looks like in Mergely:

The highlighted line is a new link. Easy!

Mergely might bog down with humungous files, though.

So I use the command line. On Linux, this command works like a charm:

‘comm –13 [oldfile] [newfile]’

That command compares oldfile to newfile, showing new stuff in newfile. Try File Compare (FC) on Windows. Your results may vary.

Here’s what a comparison of the last and latest crawls looks like in comm:

It’s fussier than Mergely, so you may get some false positives.

Review any new links. If they’re spam, you know what to do.

This is an excellent time to update your exclusion filter, too. See Step 2a, above.

Step 5: Repeat

Save the last crawl as your new baseline. When you run the next crawl, you’ll compare it to the last one. And so on. Repeat steps 3–5 as desired.

I run crawls every two to three weeks. If you have a faster-growing site, run crawls more often. It’ll make step 5 easier by reducing potential differences and delivering shorter lists of new links.

Enterprise-scale Alternatives

Our site is about 5700 pages. With the exclusion filter, our crawl generated a list of 2300 links. Hand-reviewing those isn’t all that bad. I divided it into chunks of 100, passed them around the office, and we finished reasonably quickly. If your site is millions of pages, you may need to use a crawler like Deepcrawl or OnCrawl.

You may need to look at machine learning as a spam link detection tool (there I said “machine learning” so this is now a legitimate marketing article). However, machine learning gets sticky when you’re sniffing for spam links that point at not-spammy pages.

Worth it?

Is all this work worth it?

Google won’t penalize you for trash links pointing to other sites. Probably. The linked sites don’t benefit from these links. Much.

It boils down to pettiness. I’m a petty person. I have an intense hatred of sleaze. Every spammer we found had “acquired” links from other sites. We contacted all those site owners. Then we reported every linked site to Google.

I have no idea if it’ll have an impact. But I sure feel better.

The post How to: Check Your Site For Spam Links Using Screaming Frog appeared first on Portent.

The following is a cross-post of my semi-regular Analytics column, previously published on Search Engine Watch but new for readers here. You can read all my previous columns on SEW here.

Our team at Google frequently talks to web analysts, who say they spend about half their time answering basic analytics questions for other people in their organization. In fact, a report from Forrester found 57% of marketers find it difficult to give their stakeholders in different functions access to their data and insights. To help, our team launched a new feature in Analytics to help you better understand “what happened?” questions of your data, such as “how many visitors to my site from California arrived via paid search?”

But the right “why and what next” questions are not always so easy to consider, let alone answer. Posing the wrong questions wastes precious time, and with only so many hours in the day to use your data effectively you need to become really skilled at knowing what questions to ask when analyzing results so you find answers that are actionable and relevant. Let’s go through some ways you can get better at this.

1. Have the right objectives and KPIs established before your team begins executing

I’ve advised countless companies on measurement planning over the years and continue to stress the importance of this both online and at events. If you haven’t conducted measurement planning and established what your success metrics are up front, get started today. Without this, you will never ask the right questions of your data because you’ll always be boiling the analytics ocean instead of focusing on the metrics that really matter. Establishing objectives and KPIs is the best thing you can do to ensure you always ask relevant questions that lead to action that will actually get done and are aligned with your business.

2. No analysis work in a silo: know what all your different teams are doing: product, sales, marketing, etc

If you are sitting in your analyst ivory tower all day, ultimately you will ask questions you think are interesting, but perhaps not ones which have answers your team cares about, or even really impact your business. Don’t be isolated, rather spend time with your different teams so you have your finger on the pulse of their projects and goals – you will be far better positioned to help them.

3. Automate your reporting so you can spend more time asking questions of data and less time doing repeat work

Updating custom dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports manually is a time-consuming process. It’s also one no one really enjoys doing. Sure, it’s quicker to do it once, but over time, automation will save you a lot of effort, effort which is better spent asking questions of your data to tease out meaningful insights to inform your marketing. In a previous column on ClickZ I out lined some ways to get started with this critical effort.

4. Executive summaries of your dashboards shared with your team are a chance for real-time feedback to know if you are asking the right questions

As I’ve shared before, never send a dashboard without an executive summary with the main takeaways. Your summary inevitably will include insights from questions you asked of your data when reviewing the visualizations and trends. And this summary in turn will almost always generate responses from those who you have the dashboard tailored for – all too critical for us as analysts to close the feedback loop on our analysis. Don’t ignore it.

5. Don’t waste too much time on unanswerable questions, especially if they aren’t that important

We’ve all been there when a team member asks you a question about an outlier in a given month. Maybe you had a huge spike in high bounce traffic you can’t seem to find a reason for. Usually in these such cases it didn’t matter anyway other than satisfying someone’s curiosity – but you could have spent hours on end going down the rabbit hole to try and determine why something happened that might not have been that important in the first place. In my experience nearly all the “unanswerable” questions end up being ones which didn’t matter much anyway.

6. Educate your wider marketing team on the data sources your company has access to

Without knowing what it is your analysis tools are capturing you can’t meaningfully ask good questions. So as part of onboarding new team members be sure you educate them on what data sources you have access to. The other benefit on educating your team is if someone senior like your CMO asks a question beyond the scope of your current reporting capabilities, it can be a good opportunity to research how you might answer that question and potentially ask for an increased budget if required (something we all want more of).

Here’s a free crowdfund investor’s handbook written by Davis Jones — The Favorable FOUR: The Little Handbook for Crowdfund Investors​ …

Before I get into why I want Google to drop everything they’re doing with Google Data Studio (GDS) – their answer to Power BI or Tableau – and prioritize my personal needs, I’ll say:

This post should read as a love letter to Data Studio because it is. It’s (incredibly) still a free tool, and I understand that comes with some limitations. Still, Portent has already used GDS to:

• Overhaul our entire agency reporting with progressive detail,
• Publish a visualization on our “Dark Traffic” study,
• Map public weather data stored in the Google Cloud, and
• Solve loads of other client-specific problems

Even so, being in Google Data Studio constantly has given me a perspective few have on its shortcomings. I’ll detail GDS growth opportunities here in the hopes that Nick and crew will take them with a grain of salt, but maybe move them up the roadmap.

Aesthetics

They’ve had many updates in the last year already on greater visual fine-tuning of charts and graphs, but for Data Studio to be the silver bullet for agency reporting it needs more ways to affect global settings across many pages.

User Themes

GDS has a few built-in themes (light and dark) that help you dictate background and font colors on entire reports, but it needs a way to store and re-use custom color palettes and fonts (including size relationships) across multiple reports.

We have a style guide at our agency with hex colors and fonts we’re expected to use in all client-facing deliverables. It would be nice to capture that style and add it to a new report with one click instead of manually adding it each time.

Data Label Control

Data Studio team has already added a way to re-size data labels on charts, which is brilliant; they were almost always too small before. I’d like to see them take this control granularity a step further. Specifically:

• Choosing where labels appear on the chart (e.g., Excel-style Inside Top, Outside End),
• Copying and pasting data label treatments from one graph to another, and
• Spacing control for labels in stacked column (or other similarly crowded) visualizations

More Fonts

Support for Adobe Typekit or even just matching the fonts available in other Google Doc programs (like Docs or Slides) would be sufficient here. Typography and readability are essential when presenting any content, but especially in data storytelling.

Arrows, Lines, Polygons and Other Shapes

Right now, only Circles and Rectangles can be drawn natively in GDS. So often, I have to screencap my beautiful visualizations in Data Studio and then annotate them with arrows and lines in other programs. Aside from just annotating data though, we’re also working on building funnel-style visualizations for clients, and they look super clunky with only rectangles.

Data

Aside from all the visual trappings, the data is still paramount, and some improvements there could take GDS from a great tool to an excellent tool overnight.

Support for Google Analytics’ Multi-Channel Funnels

Today, while the GDS connector for GA is pretty comprehensive, the inability to tell the Assisted Conversion story is brutal on our clients who rely on content marketing to drive results. I’ve long lamented Google Analytics keeping their attribution data separate from their primary data (in both the UI and API) and its absence in Data Studio hurts even more.

Better Documentation for Data Blending

Blending Data Sources is probably Google Data Studio’s most mouthwatering feature for data workers in theory. But in practice, it’s still very clunky; mostly because it lacks documented best practices and examples for things like join keys, date dimensions, filtering, and more.

The other day, I was trying to create a custom field to show the % change between two data points from disparate sources and aggregate it by week and was getting insane math out of it. It turns out deltas only work on a day-by-day basis. Would’ve been nice to know before I went down a 2-hour rabbit hole thinking I did something wrong.

Forecasting

Our most sophisticated clients want to know things like:

• How are we pacing to annual goals?
• How many conversions can I expect by the end of the month?

While I could manually enter those things in a bullet chart, one of our objectives as an analytics team this year is to automate everything we can so our content, search, and social practitioners can focus on insight and strategy.

It’s one thing to introduce a trend line, but being able to specify a regression and project anticipated performance against actuals would make GDS a killer app for not just marketing reports, but also finance.

Friendlier Error Treatments

As of my writing this, you can specify what you want to show up in a table when GDS finds a null value in a data source (either “no data,” “0,” or my personal favorite “-“). Similarly, scorecards and charts tend to break in GDS for a variety of reasons. While a glaring error message and a monkey wrench are right to see for those of us who are editing the reports, it can be jarring for clients viewing the reports. A way for us to add an “Under Construction” or “Temporarily Unavailable” message or visual to broken elements would soften the blow for viewers.

Bulk Editing for Metrics Across Scorecards and Charts

When a client decides they want to see a different metric for conversions than we’re reporting on, today I have to modify each element in the report one-by-one to make that change. It would be nice to have a global find and replace or even to highlight items that share a metric in common from the same data source and swap it out wholesale.

Thanks, Google Data Studio!

Ultimately, I’m writing all this because I care. I’m an ardent supporter of GDS and, for my money, their team is the fastest iterating product team at Google. I hope to see some of the changes I listed above adopted, but I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t happen. Keep up the good work!

The post My Google Data Studio Wishlist appeared first on Portent.

Happiness does not come from what you have, but from who you are and what you think.

You can be the richest person in your locality or in your office but that has no relation to you being happy. You can have the biggest house in the neighborhood but that does not mean you are happy – Well, it might make you happy but only for a very brief moment.

So, what is Happiness and what makes you feel Happy? Science says do these 11 things to be happy, and these are very simple things that each one of us can do to be happy. As we move from 2017 into 2018 , lets focus on doing things that make us feel happy in 2018.

Below are my Top 10 Quotes on Happiness

1) If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion – Dalai Lama

2) “Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are.” – Chinese Proverb

3) “Happiness is not having what you want. It is appreciating what you have.” – Unknown

4) “In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” – Deepak Chopra

5) “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” – Aristotle

6) “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln

7) “Once you do something you love, you never have to work again.” – Willie Hill

8) “Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.” – John C. Maxwell

9) “A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?” – Albert Einstein

10) “If you want to be happy, be.” -Leo Tolstoy

Have a Happy 2018 and Stay Blessed