Measuring Success

For those that are interested e-books (great for copy & pasting code) there is a PDF version of the Google Analytics book – Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics book, purchasable from Wiley.

If you have a copy of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, or are a potential reader, would you prefer it in your local language? I have always assumed that a local language is preferred. However, I ask because when translated, I loose editorial control of the text and screenshots that can result in a degrade in book quality.

I rarely comment on news, preferring instead to trial, demonstrate and collect my thoughts before writing a blog article. However this piece of news from the official Google blog is potentially so big, I wanted to add my comments straight away (and I was a web developer in a previous life)…. Yesterday, Google announced it is developing a new computer operating system and I am sure that created quite a shockwave at Microsoft’s HQ in Seattle: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html Building a new operating system for the desk top market is a huge task – not so much from a technical point of view for a company such as Google (the company built its own operating system to run the Google infrastructure from day one – based on unix), rather the driving of user adoption where others have struggled for the past 20 years. Anyone remember OS/2…? The history of the Mac is [...]

Many thanks to those who have provided feedback on the book so far. A couple of typos have slipped by me, so I wanted to post them here immediately. Please add if you find more. I will create a separate corrections page if needed. Note: this post is for the first edition of the book. The second edition (2010) errata post is part of the Pro Lounge. page 180, Differentiating Regional Search Engines: The placement of this code has had to change due to recent updates in the GATC. See the following post: www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2009/12/15/customising-the-list-of-search-engines-in-google-analytics/ page 181/182: The code pageTracker._addOrganic(“images.google”, “prev”); should be placed just before the line pageTracker._initData(); – Not after, as mentioned on page 178 (grey box, positioning of GATC hacks). pageTracker._addOrganic(“images.google”, “prev”); pageTracker._initData(); page 191, point a (referring to Figure 9.8a): The regular expression pattern should be: (?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*) as shown in Figure 9.8a. Note the change in position [...]