Email campaign stats, Google games, and other analytics – Monday July 12th Roundup

A full week this week with posts ranging from link analysis to email statistics to animation… and that’s just the first 3rd of the roundup! It’s an amazingly full week, given that the World Cup was on, which tends to reduce productivity to a crawl.

Anyhow, included in this weeks roundup is Google/Bing link analysis, email campaign stats, using multiple analytics tools, and Google Games.

• We start the week with a little more link analysis comparing Google and Bing. Both use fairly similar ranking systems, but there are some small differences. For instance, Bing places less emphasis on Yahoo or DMOZ listings (good!).
• Next up, Forrester with the value of a Facebook fan, which takes a refreshing look at the whole notion of quantifying fan value. The article is intensely critical of the very notion.
• An extra one today, because it’s just too awesome to pass up: Mailchimp’s Average Email Campaign Stats Of MailChimp Customers By Industry.

• I’ve been playing with the idea of learning more about JS/HTML5 animation, and lo-and-behold a bunch of JS animation tutorials popped up in my RSS reader. This one, an old one, was particularly cool, explaining how to do a simple robot animation with javascript and pngs.
• Grids are a foundation of design. This week SixRevisions posted a nice guide to using the 960 grid system.

• Not sure where I found this, but back on the 7th some one posted a link to an interview with Eric Peterson, discussing the issues that face the role of analytics within a business environment.
• More from Avinash. This time it’s on using multiple analytics tools to bring in data about your almost everything. Some of the cool tools he mentions include Tynt which (despite its incredibly annoying additions to any text you copy [including URLs, <sarcasm>thanks Avinash</sarcasm>]) gives cool analytics on how often people copy text from your site, and StatsIt, which tracks social media activity and can report phrases used to describe your brand terms. Very cool.

• UXmatters is busting the myths surrounding remote usability studies. There’s some really good info here for people thinking about starting up usability studies, including explanations of how remote may not necessarily be cheaper or easier.
• When did 52 Weeks of UX get so pretty? Honestly, half the reason I’m posting this is because it’s a great example of super minimalist design. On the other hand, it also discusses how you can engage your HiPPO (err, your HiPP–ugh this acronym sucks) in user research to get great results.

• This is the kind of thing I like to hear: 10 reasons NOT to copy Amazon. Let’s face it, Amazon.com has a business scope that you can’t approach, and does a lot of stuff that no one should, but it works for them because of their scale. I remember one time I typed “Osama Bin Laden” into Google’s US government search, to be greeted with a PPC ad saying “Find Osama Bin Laden at Amazon.com” (if only we had checked Amazon first!). That’s probably not a good keyword to bid on.
• Finally, Techcrunch is reporting that Google has secretly invested over a hundred million into Zynga. What does this mean? They suggest that Google is looking to launch Google Games (supported by a recent job posting for a gaming project manager), which makes a surprising amount of sense given their Chrome app store.