Goodbye to books

Did you know that a lot of school students carry between eight to 10 kilos of books to and from school everyday? If you've got back pains, then you probably did! Well, if an experiment organised by Microsoft and the Philadelphia school district is successful, that and many other things about stundents' lives will change in the future, It doesn't even have an encyclopedia.

According to Microsoft, in the future all students will have writing tablets and students will only study the material which is available on the internet.

Smartboards, which function as white boards

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BMW x5 eDrive is Coming SOON!

While BMW has been dabbling in diesel sedans and readying i3 and i8 for their 2014 debut, the German automaker has not neglected those who would rather have a hybrid. Next month at the Frankfurt Auto Show, the BMW Concept X5 eDrive plug-in hybrid will be unveiled to the world, and though not confirmed for production, it certainly looks ready for primetime.

The BMW Concept X5 eDrive pairs a 95-horsepower electric motor with a turbocharged 4-cylinder engine (of unspecified displacement and power), and can reportedly operate under electric power for up to 19 miles, and at speeds of up to 75 mph. BMW claims it consumes just 3.8 liters of fuel per 100 km, which works to approximately 62 mpg on the U.S. testing cycle.

Being a Bimmer though, engineers made sure the X5 could scoot to 60 mph in under 7 seconds, and the Concept X5 eDrive also comes with three battery modes. Save Battery maintains the current battery levels, allowing drivers to make a highway trip before slipping into electric mode at their urban destination. There’s also an all-electric mode, as well as a mode that handles all that thinking for you.

The BMW Concept X5 eDrive makes its official debut next month, and it looks ready to go from the show floor to the dealership if you ask me

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Google Analytic's Importance

By utilizing custom dashboards, you can keep an eye on specific aspects of your blogs health. Doing this will give you a greater overall picture of how your site is performing, as well as how it may need to be improved.

The real benefit of using multiple dashboards is that you can easily segment the data, making it easier to understand and digest. Using custom dashboards, you’ll be able to see a spike or loss in traffic, whether or not your landing pages are performing well and if your social mentions have increased from a social campaign, and much more.

There are several dashboards available to use, but these five should give your site an immediate boost if you use the data they provide properly.

(Note: To use the links make sure you’re logged in to Google Analytics, or the links will appear broken!)

1. Brand Monitoring


The Brand Monitoring dashboard allows you to customize and replace the key terms with your own brand. By doing this, you can see how mentions of your brand are appearing in different social media channels.

You can also see where and how often you’ve been mentioned, as well as the percentage of visits to your site from each source. Having this information can help you gauge how effective your marketing campaigns and efforts are.

2. SEO Dashboard

SEO Dashboard allows you to see the total number of organic visits to your website as well as which keywords are bringing in traffic. It will also allow you to see which landing pages are most popular and effective.

You can also see which sites people are being directed from, as well as the bounce rate of new keywords. SEO Dashboard is a pretty deep tool, so taking a bit of time to explore what it can do your site is a smart move.

3. Social Monitoring



The Social Monitoring dashboard is specifically used to tell you how social media is affecting your site. In order to be effective and streamlined, Social Monitoring limits the data it shows you to tell you which social media networks are bringing in the most data, how they’re interacting based on time and day and much more.

4. Traffic Dashboard


Traffic Dashboard was designed to help you keep an eye on your incoming visitors. Using the dashboard, you can find out how many unique pageviews you’re getting, how many pages users are visiting, the total number of pageviews, how much time they’re spending on your site and on each page in particular. You can also perform a comparison search by date range to figure out where decreases in traffic are coming from so you get a jumpstart on correcting them.

5. Ecommerce Dashboard


If you have e-commerce tracking enabled on your site, you can use the Ecommerce Dashboard to find your conversion rate, total revenue, average value of individual sales and the average value of transactions and unique purchases.

Correlating this with other dashboard tools, you’ll be able to see where these sales are coming from and how you can better focus your efforts to make more or boost lagging sales figures.

Using these five dashboards, you can keep an eye on the health of your site and perform strategic calls to action to improve your site. For example, if you want to focus on running a Facebook giveaway, using these tools could tell you whether or not the campaign was successful by telling you about unique page visits, where users were coming from and a whole lot more.

If you install these dashboards, and you should, make sure you examine how well they are performing at least once per week in order to really get the most information you can from them. If you monitor these dashboards regularly, they can only help your business grow.

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