Official blog for the book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton
If you have an interest in measuring the success of your website and you have heard of Google Analytics, then this blog, the Google Analytics book and the supporting services are aimed at you. Measuring Success - also the title of the first chapter in the book - is about using Google Analytics and other complementary tools, to measure the success (or not) of your website and how to optimise it.
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 small number of typos have come to my attention with the 3rd edition – four so far. These will be corrected in the next re-print (due end of May). However I wanted to list them here for people to be aware of. Please let me know (by adding a comment here) if you find others.
Ch 7, page 254 – Figure 7.15
Figure 7.15 illustrates a hostname differentiation filter. The “Field B” and “Output To” have no option selected, and only show a dash -. They should instead read “Request URI”. Replacement image shown below. [...]
These are 13 of the best tools (aka add-ons) that have made significant differences to how I work with Google Analytics. I have not attempted to list all possible add-ons that are available – I seem to come across a new one every day…! Rather, ones that I have used in real-world situations that have helped me do my job. [...]
There are two fundamental questions you need to answer in order to assess the performance of your website:
1. What is driving visitors to my website?
2. What do they do once they arrive?
These are the same questions no matter what position you have in the organisation – its just the level of detail in the answer that changes. Essentially, no matter what your role of interest or responsibility is for your website, these two questions are where you start your investigations. For that is what “analysis” is – an investigation of data and the building of a hypothesis from it.
As a practitioner this is what I do for a living and this is what the 3rd edition of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics is all about! [...]
After two years since the last book the 3rd edition is finally here – officially shipping on Amazon et al from 19th March 2012. Thanks to all who have provided feedback on the last two editions. Its been both flattering and humbling when people write with praise. It makes my day/week in a way no other job or role has ever done – which ultimately is my driver for writing.
Come and join me for the Launch Party in Stockholm (March 29th)
What’s new in the 3rd edition?
As you may know, my aim with these books has always been to give the reader a thorough understanding of web analytics, from a practitioners point of view, using Google Analytics as the tool of choice. There are lots of details (well the book is called Advanced…!), but only when it is necessary. That is, where there is a good business opportunity/insight to be gained from it…
In 2011 alone there was a wealth of announcements from the GA Team (coolest first):
…
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