Last week I attended my 8th GA Summit in Mountain View (the first one had just 10 people in the room! Four of that original group where there this year*). For a change, I summarise the highlights - and why I consider them important to you the GA user - as an infographic
Its good to know the limits of your Google Analytics implementation. All software has it limits and Google Analytics is no exception. This list is Universal Analytics specific.
I was recently interviewed by CMSWire. Apart from pointing you to the full article, I thought the questions, expertly posed by Siobhan Fagan, were very relevant. I particularly liked:
What do you see as the future direction of analytics?
I enjoy sticking my neck out on future predictions, so I reproduce my answer to this question here...
In my post form last week, I commented on Econsultancy's 5th Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2012. An area that stood out for me in that report was the 8% market share of GA Premium, the paid version of Google Analytics. In this post I wanted to spend more time sharing my thoughts on the wider points raised by this report...
I am a big fan of Econsultancy because of the quality of the work these guys do. In case you missed it they published their 5th Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2012 today. As with the previous reports, it's fascinating snapshot on where web analytics is right now - both as a process and as an industry.
But what got my attention are the GA Premium numbers... [...]
If you manage a Google Analytics account, then understanding regular expressions - and how to set them up - is a key part of your job. This tutorial is intended to jump start novice users into the world of regular expressions - specifically from a Google Analytics point of view. [...]
A good friend of mine, Daniel Waisberg, and I were discussing how organisations are reluctant to invest in their Google Analytics setup - be it implementation, training & education or insights/consultancy. Our conclusion was, that is difficult to get even the richest of companies to invest in a product that is free. The perception is that everything else that is required to make it "work" i.e. all of the above, should also be free.
Of course the new GA Premium product changes this a great deal - though that is very much aimed at large enterprises i.e. Fortune 500 types. That group aside, why is it an organisation will pay tens of thousands of pounds on a CMS platform or CRM solution, but fail to see the opportunities of investing a similar amount (or less!) in their web analytics?
As I wrote in an article last year, the hard part of web analytics is gaining insights form your reports when all you have is the basic setup. You must go beyond the basics if you wish your measurements to actually impact your business.
With this in mind, I asked Daniel to write a guest post on what it takes to get your GA implementation up to the next level. Below is a 10-point check list he recommends for both beginners and advanced users.
An odd announcement form the GA product team was made last night that affects all users of web analytics tools: When a signed in user visits your...
Improving a website without web analytics may sound odd coming from a data analyst, but its quite a common occurrence for me, and in fact, part of my day job as a website performance consultant.
Following John Ekman's guest post on the two types of personas he has observed in this industry (Conversionistas are from Venus and Metrics people from Mars), I started thinking about how best to illustrate these. I consider myself a HYBRID - part conversionista and part metrics person (may be 50:50), and this case study illustrates the conversionista side of my work...