Doesn't get much more verbose than that.
A little Friday fun and something to ponder. My good friend Sue and I often talk about words and their meanings. Often times we’ll make up words or acronyms as our fearless Cazbah leader Charles Broersma likes to do. Somehow this week we got on the subject of such words and vernacular and verbose.
Here are the definitions according to Dictionary.com.
Vernacular: of or pertaining to such a language.
Verbose: characterized by the use of many or too many words
I like to say that Charles is a “vernacularist” (which is my made up word) when it comes to the language of Cazbah. When you provide internet marketing and community management services for small business, there are many words that can describe that, but some words are better created from scratch to describe the uniqueness of Cazbah’s business.
My definition of vernacularist would be ‘speaking in dialect pertaining to such a language’. Charles is great at creating words that actually mean something to Cazbah employees and make perfect sense when spoken without a definition provided – brilliant in my mind! To those outside of Cazbah these words may require further explanation, therefore these words are vernacular.
As we dug deeper into this subject, we started pondering the term verbose and the question was asked “if verbose is too many words, what is the opposite of that”? According to Dictionary.com and Opposite-Word.com the opposite of verbose is concise or laconic. I have to tell you I disagree, and here’s why. The definitions are as follows:
Concise: expressing or covering much in few words; brief in form but comprehensive in scope
Laconic: using few words; expressing much in few words
Now expressing something in few words, but being comprehensive and getting to the point is concise (unlike this sentence). The opposite of Verbose, however, might be defined as “not having used enough words to make ones point” or ”the inability to make ones point due to finding ones self at a loss for words“. THAT is the opposite of verbose in my mind.
Being concise gets the point across in few words, but not TOO few words. Verbose gets the point across with using too may words. If there were not enough words (which is the opposite of too many words), then the point would not be made (like this post). I might propose a new word for the opposite of verbose to add to my vernacular, and the nominees are:
- inverbose
- unverbacious
- verbaciousless
Can you tell me in a concise manner what your opposite might be? A little fun for a Friday – use as many or as few words as you like! (Yes, I’m still talking…) Hopefully I’ve made my point in a very verbose manner that to be concise would be nice, but would also use just enough words.
Google Analytics recently rolled out the new “Intelligence” section of Analytics – adding more features to how we track and manage web conversions. I thought I’d take a few minutes to show you the basics on how to set them up and why you might want to use them.
The more we know about our web site’s performance, the better we can plan for upcoming drops in traffic (based on past trends), or prepare for increased traffic with successful marketing campaigns.
Annotations can be an effective tool in placing reminders right into your analytical data that you can refer back to when pulling historical data. A couple of examples of where you might do this:
- Large/Sudden drop in traffic due to perhaps a power outage – note the power outage so a year from now when you look at historical date you remember that.
- A jump in traffic could be due to an email campaign, press release, blog post, new product intro – note the specific event in your Google analytics account.
- When you are working with tools like Google AdWords you often make budget changes, create new Ad Groups, pause Ad Groups. Creating an annotation is a good idea to track these events.
- Perhaps you launch a full site redesign that includes all new content that will need to be re-indexed by the search engines. Create an annotation.
There are many reasons to create annotations in Google Analytics as they are quick ‘at-a-glance’ checkpoint when looking at your data. Below is a quick snap-shot of annotations and how to create them.
The above image shows the same data point and how to view/create annotations. Here’s the breakdown:
Image A shows the data point (date) where there was a jump in traffic. Notice in the image the little thought bubble at the bottom. This is the indicator that lets you know there is an Annotation associated with that date.
Image B shows what you will see if you mouse-over the annotation bubble. It shows you the date, how many site visits on that date, and how many annotations have been created for that date. (If you have clicked on that, you’ll see your annotations just below this graph).
Image C is what you see when you click on the annotation bubble – this is where you get the option to “Create New Annotation.”
Once you’ve clicked on “Create New Annotation” you have the option to insert text associated with the event you want to track for that date. (See image below) It’s pretty straight forward – just put in a very brief description of the event you are tracking. “BLOG POST: Creating Google Annotations” would be the description I would create if I created one for this post. Save it, and your done!
Creating Annotations in Google Analytics
I am finding Google Analytics Annotations to be a good tool to use when doing specific tasks related to Social Media tasks. I know we use monitoring and tracking tools for Social Media, and Google Analytics was not built specifically for that, but often times customers want that quick ‘at-a-glance” view of how things are going, how a Facebook change may have been successful or generated new fans, if a blog post drove traffic to your site, etc.
I hope this was helpful.
