Don't buy the first editionSeriously – 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 I was re-writing whole sections. Why? Partly because Google Analytics has advanced so much in that time frame that my approach to optimising web sites had changed; Partly because I believe my writing style has improved dramatically since my first book attempt; And partly because since leaving Google, I have gained more experience of using Google Analytics with some great forward thinking people and clients.

For example, two years ago social networking meant having a Myspace account and a Facebook page. Twitter was hardly even heard of, browsing the web on your mobile was quite simply a PITA (pain in the *ss) and if you used the term MVT most people thought you were referring to music television – not mutlivariate testing!

Now, social marketing is the new SEO, the presidential campaign was won on Facebook (not quite, but social networking was a very large part of fund raising and voter engagement – see the excellent presentation by fellow Xoogler Dan Siroker), eye witness tweets hit the news wire faster than CNN and smartphones are the fastest growing segment of the mobile market. Google is even selling a smartphone itself, as well as producing what is possibly going to be the mobile operating system of choice for the next 10 years.

The result is 7 months of hard graft to bring you what I hope is a much better, easier to digest, up-to-date and engaging book. It is essentially a complete re-write – growing to just beyond the 500 page mark – the first edition is 360 pages and took me 18 months to write. Partly because I was a poor writer, and partly because I was working full time for Google at the time i.e. evening, weekends and holidays were sacrificed in the name of “knowledge transfer”.

Anyhow, I hope you will enjoy it. I will provide an update when ready to launch – hopefully mid February.

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