Google officially launched its free music site in China where any Chinese user can download free Chinese music from Chinese artists signed by Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music. This noted as an actual effort considering that Baidu offered free music that for awhile has hurt Google’s search market share:

Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said one reason Google lagged in the mainland search market was because it did not offer music downloads, the missing piece to its strategy in a market where it trails leader Baidu.com.

“We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads,” Lee told reporters. “We were missing one piece … we didn’t have music.”

Not surprisingly, this is limited to only China and if you want to get your fair share of music that is being unfairly regionally blocked, then there are only two things hindering you:

1. Learn Chinese
2. Use a proxy that is based in China

If you can do those two things, then enjoy downloading free music.

Now the legal question: If music is available for free in China, then can the music industry here in the United States actually still claim you are costing them money?

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With any program there will be quirks that one has to learn either through trial and error or just common usage and Google Analytics has some of these aspect as well.

• Visits / Entrances: Visits are mostly used within the Traffic Sources section whereas Entrances are used within the Content section. The quirk about these two metrics is that they capture the same kind of data–essentially a session entry into the site. Therefore, if you check the number of entrances in the Top Landing Pages in Top Content and then go to Traffic Sources and segment by Landing Pages, the numbers between Visits and Entrances are the same.
• IP Addresses: One can include or exclude IP addresses (say for the purpose of excluding or including internal traffic), but if you want to find out what IP addresses you may want to segment, this cannot be done within any profile. Not sure if it is possible even with GA’s API.
• Page Titles: Google Analytics can pull page titles as a way to view duplicate page titles, but you cannot view your Meta Descriptions for the same purpose as well.
• Ad Slot Position: PPC can see whether the PPC ad is displayed on the top or on the right hand side, and yet, cannot actually optimize the ads to be placed in those specific positions. Oh, and of course, no ability for SEO to see their keyword positions

Any other quirks noticed?

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TV advertisements may be in a state of flux nowadays, but that does not mean TV ads are getting less interesting:

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