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Brian Clifton is a search and web analytics expert. From 2005, Brian was Google's Head of Web Analytics for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

He recently left Google to become Senior Strategist for Omega Digital Media. We caught up with Brian to ask him about his experiences at Google, his views on web analytics and his new book.

Mobile advertising is going to be big. Really big. Or at least that’s what the analysts are clamouring to tell us, with a succession of bullish forecasts having been released since the dawn of time. And they keep on coming.

A number of well known UK brands have been penalised recently by Google for boosting their rankings through paid links and reviews.

This happened to Moneysupermarket.com last year, more recently to Gocompare, and just last week Kwik-Fit's car insurance offering was relegated from page 2 to the relative obscurity of page 5 of the search engine.

Traffic to Google Checkout has overtaken that to rival online payment service PayPal for the first couple of weeks in December.

Hitwise's Robin Goad finds that the payment service has taken a marginal lead, though this doesn't necessarily indicate that more people are making payments through Google Checkout.

Google Analytics, Big G's highly popular free reporting software, is two years old tomorrow, but what impact has it had and what's in store for the future?

Arguably one of the biggest developments in the online marketing space in the past few years, Google Analytics is a fine tool for marketers, although it isn't without its issues.

We caught up with Google Analytics' Brian Clifton, as well as web analytics gurus Jim Sterne and Eric Peterson, to see how the software is shaping up, two years on... 

Google has launched its own version of Del.icio.us; a social bookmarking service called Google Shared Stuff that allows users to share their favourite links with friends.

By adding a button to your browser, you can bookmark any web page you like, label it, then display it on your Shared Stuff page.

Google today launched Gadget Ads, a new interactive rich media ad format which will allow advertisers to measure users' responses to the ads, as well as updating ad content in real time.

The new ads designed for use across Google's network of sites, and aims to offer a way for internet users to interact with ad content in a way that is not possible with standard web ads. 

Google’s grand plan for YouTube is set to take a step forward today with the launch of in-video ads for a small group of the site’s clients.

The move, coming almost a year after Google’s $1.65bn purchase of the video sharing site, will see the web giant going out on a limb in its choice of format in a bid not to annoy the site’s 130m viewers.

Google has turned to a new tactic to boost its local search services, offering people money to go door-to-door and collect information about small businesses.

The Google ‘Local Business Referrals’ programme, now launched in the US and expected to be introduced in the UK at some point, will see independent contractors gathering data for its Google Maps database.