Google is planning to upgrade its services in the next few weeks, affecting many services that are vital for SEO marketers.

One of the services which will be hit is Google Analytics, which webmasters and SEO marketers use to analyse traffic sources and levels of traffic to a site.

Google Analytics is used by SEO experts for a variety of purposes, including testing new products, and managing targets and spending for PPC campaigns. The message informing all analytics users of the outage has been displayed on accounts currently using the service.

The message displayed by Google says “Starting Mar 2, 2010, the Analytics system will be unavailable from approximately 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM (Pacific time) for maintenance.
“While you may not be able to view your most current data during this time, your data will continue to be collected and processed so you can view it once we finish.
“Thank you for your patience.”

No new features or filters are going to be added to Google Analytics during this period, and all account will be frozen so campaigns cannot be changed or stopped in the time period.

Google is making the upgrade to improve its service and boost the service’s reliability.

And use of news searches surges ahead

Worldwide search statistics compiled by Google Analytics show that 2009 has been the year of natural search as, for the first time, it has generated consistently greater traffic than paid search.

But there is also a clear divide emerging from the Google Analytics figures.

They show that there remains a strong reliance on PPC search results in the territories of the Far East. This perhaps reflects a difference in cultures where a company’s trust among its customers is measured in terms of the amount of money it is prepared to invest in promoting its products and services on line.

SEO has also opened up a clear gap ahead of PPC searches when it comes to traffic volumes generated through news searches.

Indeed, while volumes of generic searches are staying relatively consistent, the big growth has been seen in searches of news reference sources, such as Google News or MSN News.

Over the five years to 2009, news site searches have grown exponentially, as consumers have come to trust them to be more independent than generic search. In this area, PPC and SEO searches stayed broadly level until the end of 2008, when SEO first took a clear lead, which it steadily stretched over the following year, and was continuing to do so at the time this was written.

PPC traditionally hits an annual high as Christmas approaches, with surfers looking for gifts, and presumably turning to the PPC results as they see familiar brands represented among them.

But for each of the last three years, that peak has been lower than in the preceding year, meaning that companies relying on PPC for their rankings at this time are almost certainly getting smaller returns on their outlay.

Google’s findings show clearly why so many companies are placing greater emphasis on securing listings in Google News, as these have come to be seen as more trusted and impartial than both organic and PPC results.

With the recession continuing to be uppermost in many people’s minds, there should be little surprise that one area of internet search which is booming is for discount vouchers, according to research reported in the Financial Times.

Internet searches in the UK for “discount vouchers” grew by 47.5 per cent in the year since last August, according to Hitwise, the internet research company. Google’s records show a 67 per cent jump in searches for the term “discount vouchers” between December 2007 and December 2008

Online discount vouchers are widely available, and offer savings on all manner of purchases. And the main users, according to Hitwise, are professional and white-collar workers, with about 70 per cent of them claiming to have used a money-off coupon in the last six months.

Recession-scarred consumers are embracing a thrifty habit that is likely to outlast any economic recovery: the use of online discount vouchers to save money on retail, food and other purchases.

Robin Goad, UK director of research at Hitwise, said searching for vouchers had become an established part of online shopping. “Consumer behaviour has changed so that people are looking online to research a product, looking at where to find the best price and finally doing a search to see if there is a voucher for it.”