Google Analytics not compatible with IE8?

Image by Dekuwa via Flickr

I've not bothered to grab IE8 yet (nor Firefox 3.5, for that matter) but this question on Google's AdWords help forum caught my attention.

RolandV writes,

When I try to access my Analytics account through the Analytics tab under "Reporting" in AdWords, I consistently (on various accounts) get "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage". However, this works fine when I do the same in Chrome.

Is this a bug in AdWords, IE8, both? What do I have to do when I want to use IE8, not Chrome?

RolandV, I suspect, will be writing about the AdWords version of Google Analytics rather than trying to access Google Analytics directly (it's the same thing; just a different colour).

Does anyone else suffer from this issue?

Like the Bing logo? Microsoft puts the company that designed it up for sale

Back when Microsoft bought aQuantive in order to get its hands on Atlas and other technologies the software giant also picked up the ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish.

Image by erokCom™ via Flickr

Yup; Avenue A/Razorfish was created through the merger of the ad agencies Avenue A and Razorfish. Names like that don’t to last long and rather than being called AA/R the agency was rebranded as Razorfish.

Microsoft are hoping for as much as $700m for Razorfish. The aQuantive deal was huge and set Microsoft back a staggering $6b but nevertheless, getting a full $700m back for the advertising agency bit isn’t bad.

That’s if they manage to get that much. The sale of Razorfish has been long rumoured. Back in October 08 we saw headlines like Razorfish buys Wysiwyg – WPP denies it’s buying Razorfish.

In fact, back in 2007 we saw the Tribbble Ad Agency run articles like Avenue A | Razorfish employees get screwed by Microsoft. That article had the brilliant quote from an anonymous employee.

“If they are not going to treat us like Microsoft Employees, then what’s the point of working for Microsoft”

Razorfish has huge clients. People like Kraft, Coca-Cola and Disney. People are talking up either WPP or Publicis as buyers. Heck; people are even discussing Omnicom as a potential buyer but as PepsiCo is an important client for Omnicom I suspect there may be an issue there.

My money is currently on Publicis simply because they recently announced a partnership/joint venture with Microsoft last week (which sparked thoughts of a Razorfish sale in my mind then; as I’m sure it did for other people too).

Razorfish didn’t simply design the Bing logo. It is a healthy part of the impressive advertising campaign for Microsoft’s decision engine.

I doubt the sale of Razorfish will impact Bing at all. If anything it removes conflict of interest concerns. People didn’t like Google owning the advertising agency bits of DoubleClick but I suspect too few people in the Search Industry knew to trace Razorfish back to Microsoft.

Who bought the advertising agency bits of DoubleClick from Google? It was Publicis.

AltaVista search results ranking on page one at Google

This isn't something you see every day and that's the only reason I took the screen grab - here we see AltaVista results ranking on the first page in Google.

Google's said (via Matt Cutts) that it doesn't want other search results ranking in the index. They took action to remove YouTube search results out. This may be why UK charity search engine Everyclick struggles to rank even on non-search pages. It is also a statement that gives retailers with faceted search CMS sites cause for concern although Google's not likely to treat those canned search/navigation pages the same as 'free hand' search results.

Wolfram Alpha better than Google on Michael Jackson's death

This is a pretty good result from Wolfram Alpha. Let's not compare Google and Wolfram Alpha in any serious "like for like" way. Let's just look at the differences in speed here. Wolfram Alpha is giving me the right result for the "right" Michael Jackson.

Compare that to the results that Search Engine Journal captured.

The poor state of UK search today

I hate to say it but the UK search engines are an a truly terrible state today.

Image via Wikipedia

Bing

We don't have Bing. We have a Live Search with Powerset hybrid. It's beta and significantly behind Bing US.

Yahoo

Yahoo's vital Site Explorer has been malfunctioning for the last few days. Key search commands like site: simply don't work any more.

Google

The Google.co.uk results are a mess. They're full of international results; America, Australian and New Zealand pages.

The Google situation is perhaps the most alarming. It's been going on for a long time now - far longer than the trackback flood that predated the Flordia update. The trackback flood was the last time I've seen it this bad.

One concern with the Google.co.uk results today is that perhaps Google doesn't see them as bad results. Could it be that they're using Google.com for American results and Google.co.uk for "international English"?

TradeDoubler gears up to launch behavioural targeting

The affiliate network TradeDoubler has emailed their affiliates to ask them to help categorise their websites. Affiliates will say what type of site they run so that TradeDoubler's auto-targeting systems can better target users on those sites.

Sounds look a good idea but behavioural targeting is hugely unpopular so this is a PR risk by the network. This may also annoy affiliates a little as it'll increase the chances of people blocking/refusing TradeDoubler cookies.

Their email said;

The categorisation of websites will also enable the future launch of interest based advertising. With interest based advertising a publisher can show ads targeted to each user. The selection is based upon an interest profile built up when a user is browsing sites within TradeDoubler's network. For example, a person visiting more sports websites than average will be shown more ads related to sports.

What are the next steps?
We will be asking you to categorise your current websites when you next log in. This should only take a few minutes. You can select up to four top level categories per site and you should select the most accurate categories to match the content of your website. After you have categorised your website using the popup you can edit these categories from the “Site information” page in your account.

TradeDoubler, like Google, are trying hard not to call this behavioural targeting and are calling this "interest based targeting" instead. You can read more of the network's policy and OPT OUT of the targeting from this legal page here.

Twitterfeed borked

It's very annoying when Twitterfeed is down. This is an account which is responsible for a whole bunch of auto-tweets into a whole bunch of Twitter profiles.


Twitterfeed recently took cash from Betaworks - investors in both Bit.ly and Twitter. They alo launched a redesigned site just recently.

It's a shame to see them offline. I use verisign (old skool!) to login. Perhaps the snaffu is in that mechanism.