Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 364 pages
• Published by: Sybex March 31, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0470253126
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0470253120
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 1.3 pounds

Product Description
Let Web metrics expert Brian Clifton help you maximize your website's potential. In this book you'll discover the information you need to get a true picture of your site's impact and stay competitive using Google Analytics. Featuring implementation techniques not documented elsewhere, this informative guide teaches you how to turn data into actionable information and optimize the user experience of your website for better conversions. You'll learn to:

• Measure your web traffic, its sources and visitor engagements and understand its impact on ROI
• Configure your data collection parameters to track all online marketing channels, Flash events, banners, and more
• Follow best practices for tracking offline activities and learn how to extract, analyze, and integrate the collected data
• Optimize checkout systems, pay-per-click campaigns (including AdWords), SEO, and email marketing efforts
• Discover the benefits of ad version testing and the insight multivariate testing can bring

With a better understanding of your website visitors, you will be able to tailor page content and marketing budgets with laserlike precision for a better return on investment, and ultimately, a better bottom line.

Back Cover Copy
How Does Your Website Measure Up?

Are you getting the most out of your website? Google insider and web metrics expert Brian Clifton reveals the information you need to get a true picture of your site's impact and stay competitive using Google Analytics (GA) and the latest web metrics methodologies.

Which marketing campaigns work best? How do you quantify their success? What indicators should you track? Packed with techniques and insider secrets not documented elsewhere, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics has the expert guidance you need to enhance your brand and increase your site's ROI. Learn how to:

• 
  
  Measure your web traffic and understand its impact on ROI
• 
  
  Configure your data collection parameters, then extract and analyze the collected data
• 
  
  Drill down to the precise visitor segments or time periods you choose
• 
  
  Discover how long it takes for your visitors to convert to customers
• 
  
  Follow best practices for page tagging and tracking dynamic web pages, Flash events, banners, and more
• 
  
  Optimize checkout systems, pay-per-click campaigns (including AdWords), SEO, and e-mail marketing, and use ad version testing in conjunction with multivariate testing
• 
  
  Centralize your data collection and track offline campaigns

This book is a recipe for measuring your success and optimizing your online marketing."
—Jim Sterne, Founding Director and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association

I can confidently recommend this book to anybody serious about turning web analytics into a competitive business advantage."
—Dennis R. Mortensen, COO, IndexTools, Inc.

Brian Clifton does a fantastic job of explaining how to effectively power a web analytics strategy using Google Analytics. Both new and seasoned GA users will benefit from Brian's book and his expertise."
—Justin Cutroni, Director of Analytics and Testing, EpikOne

What Brian Clifton doesn't know about Google Analytics probably hasn't been invented yet. In this book he shares his extensive knowledge in a concise and coherent fashion."
—Neil Mason, Managing Director, Applied Insights

What's fantastic about this book is the practical, detailed help it gives you to get real value out of your web analytics tool."
—Ashley Friedlein, CEO, E-consultancy.com

Reader Reviews
I've been running Google Analytics on a number of web sites since it was first released in 2005. I've got a lot of good information out of it, but I've always suspected that I'm not using it to its full potential. Having read this book I now have a much better idea of what I'm missing and, more importantly, how I can put that right. Brian Clifton has written a really useful guide to getting the most benefit out of Google's free web analytics system. He is, of course, well-placed to do that as he leads the Google Analytics team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Part one is a good overview of web analytics is. Chapter one explains what web analytics is and what you can get out of it. Chapter two goes into more detail about the method that people use to analyse their web site traffic and chapter three introduces Google Analytics and explains where it fits into the web analytics landscape. Part two gives an introduction to using Google Analytics. Chapter four looks at the interface to Google Analytics. This chapter gives the reader a good free for the interactivity of the Google Analytics interface. It's this interactivity that makes Google Analytics far easier to use than many of its competitors. Chapter five looks in more depth at ten of the reports that the system generates. By the end of this chapter I was already learning new little tips about the system. Part three is about implementing Google Analytics on your web site. chapter six shows you how to tag your web pages so they are included in your reports. This is about as far as my Google Analytics knowledge goes. So chapter seven introduces ways to customise the Google Javascript code in order to have more control over what data is recorded, it was all new (and very interesting). For example, the chapter has techniques for measuring page load time and tracking outgoing links. Chapter eight is all about Google Analytics best practices and is full of the kinds of tips that only an expert in using the tool would be able to share with you. Having read this chapter I configured up some of my sites to track search queries and set up more goals on my sites. Chapter nine is called "Google Analytics Hacks" and is a really useful cookbook of tips and techniques for getting even more out of Google Analytics. Top of my list of things to implement from this chapter is to add tracking to all of my error pages. The sections we've discussed so far have all been about generating as much useful data about your web site traffic as possible. But, of course, huge piles of data don't do you any good at all unless you can make some sense of the data and then act on your findings. This is what part four is about. Chapter ten offers some useful hints on how to make sense of all of the data you have collected. Clifton looks at a web site from a number of points of view (sales, marketing, web content creator and webmaster) and for each of them suggests a number of key performance indicators that will be of interest to them. He then shows how to construct these KPIs out of the data that Google Analytics has captured. Chapter eleven moves on to the next stage and looks a number of real-world examples where data from Google Analytics can be used to identify poor performance from areas of a web site and suggests ways to improve matters. I'm no web analytics expert and, to be honest, some of the stuff in part four made my eyes glaze over a little. But my company doesn't rely on its web site for income so I've never had to worry about the number of visitors I get or how long they spend on the site. Web analytics has really just been a hobby for me. If I was in a company where those kinds of things were important, then I feel confident that this book would be the right one to turn to in order to learn more. This book certainly goes into more depth when talking about both the technical side of Google Analytics and how to interpret the data than any other book I've read on the subject. This book has taught me a lot of new and interesting things about Google Analytics and I feel sure that I'll be going back to it in the future when I need to know more. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to get the most out of their Google Analytics installation.