Measuring Success with Google Analytics

There are two Google products for web analytics – Urchin Software and Google Analytics. Which one should you choose? This article describes what criteria to use for deciding between the two and is a follow up to my recent article “What is Urchin 6“.
As a general guide, Marketers prefer Google Analytics, IT departments prefer Urchin…
This statement is reflected in the user-base for each product. Urchin is mainly used for measuring intranets (an area of the business that Marketing is not involved in), and used by web-hosting providers where deployment scalability for a large number of websites is important.
On the other hand, Google Analytics, apart from being a free service (Urchin requires a purchased license), is used by organizations that wish to have greater control of their individual web analytics implementation.
Those are not mutually exclusive rules or requirements, so lets look at some criteria.
When GA is the best fit
Select Google Analytics [...]

Tools and helper applications I have come across as a practitioner come in two flavours: those that help you with your administration of Google Analytics – install, setup and configuration, and those that help you use or interpret reports – visualisation aides, third-party integration, segmentation help, and so forth.
Often these two scenarios overlap, and marketers frequently find themselves using the same toolset as webmasters and web developers. This post is a compendium of useful tools I have used for GA administration. Regardless of your job role, all the tools listed here are straightforward to use.
[ This page is an edited version of Appendix B, taken from the second edition of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. The new book is due March 2010 ]
Tools to Audit Your GATC Deployment
The key to being able to improve your website is having good, solid, accurate data that you can rely on. A fundamental step [...]

I often receive questions about Urchin – what it is (typically: Is it the commercial version of GA?) how it compares with Google Analytics, and how to choose between the two. This post, an abstract from the latest version of the book, explains what Urchin is, its relationship to Google Analytics and why, if at all, you need to consider it.
Urchin Software Inc. is the company and technology that Google acquired in April 2005 and went on to become Google Analytics—a free web analytics service that uses the resources at Google (I explain more about its history in Google Analytics – Fours Years on). Urchin software is a downloadable web analytics program that runs on a local server (Unix or Windows).
Typically, this is the same machine as your web server. The Urchin Software creates reports by processing your web server logfiles (including hybrid logfiles) and is commonly referred to as [...]

Seriously – don’t buy Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (first edition)…. Why? Because there is a second edition just around the corner. In fact its due in March
The first edition is nearly two years old – eons in Internet years (well probably equivalent to dog years). Those two years were a great success – both personally for me (reading reviews of your work form people you have never met before always brings a smile to my face and a glow to my cheeks – it’s a fantastic ego boost. So much so, I have to prick my head occasionally to prevent it getting oversized!) and for the publisher, who figured out the business of printing and distributing it was good enough to invite me to update the original.
And that’s how it started out – an update. A few week’s work right, ten at tops.
However, within 3 weeks [...]

Google Analytics recognises 41 search engines by default. Although this is constantly being added to, there are of course a great many other search engines in the world – language and region specific, as well as price comparison and vertical portals.
The purpose of this hack, is to be able to differentiate regional variations of search engines. For example, instead of just reporting search engines as their generic Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. (as Google Analytics will do by default), I want to be more regional specific in order to compare SEM efforts in different countries:
[ Last update Dec 2009: Now 100+ additional SEs + GA defaults (140+ domains). You no longer need to re-define the default set of search engines that Google Analytics uses as this hack now prepends new search engines to GA's list. For details on new prepend revision see: code.google.com ]

Google.com
Google.co.uk
MSN.co.uk
MSN.fr
eniro.se
eniro.no
maps.google.com (local search)
etc.

It is [...]