Archive for March, 2009

Mar 19
2009

I’ll be heading out to the UK next week to attend WSI’s Excellence & Innovation conference for their global internet marketing consultants. On Monday March 30, I’ll be conducting a one day workshop on Google Analytics. I am told we have 40+ registered attendees (the event is already sold out!) and I am really looking forward to this session.

We typically run a 2-day Google Analytics workshop and pace the material accordingly. So cramming everything in to one day is going to be a challenge. Don’t worry WSI consultants, I won’t cram too much – I’ll be selective :) . The other challenge I am going to address is the needs of a mixed audience: some beginners, some with working knowledge of GA, and others that are pretty GA savvy. I don’t have a perfect solution for this challenge, but having done a number of these online marketing and analytics workshops over the years, I think we have managed to figure out a way to run them effectively. We will ensure that at the end of the day everyone will leave with a lot of practical tips, step-by-step guides, and references on how to enhance their Google Analytics implementation, analysis, and consulting know-how.

The workshop agenda has been sent to the attendees but I am planning on a couple of extra sessions. I would appreciate your comments on what you want to see in these extra sessions. Either email me directly at (feras @ e-nor .com) or leave a comment on this post.

I am known for being a last minute guy :) , so me writing this post almost two weeks ahead of the event is almost unheard of! The first thing the folks in the office will say when they read this post is “are you feeling ok?” :)

Thanks!

PS. We also have an upcoming Google Analytics workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area, on June 17 & 18.

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Mar 06
2009

The executive team at E-Nor is quite greedy! Provide them with a neat trick and instead of thanking you, they ask for more! :)

A few days after my colleague and I wrote about content grouping in Google Analytics, E-Nor president Feras Alhlou asked if it is possible to apply the same concept to referring sites.

Our objective is to group all domains and subdomains of related referring sites as one referring entity. For example, nextag.com, nextag.co.uk, and affiliates.nextag.com should appear as a single Nextag entity.

1) Create an advanced filter that renames all domains and subdomains of a particular referring site to one entity.

2) Repeat step 1 for every group of referring sites that send you significant traffic.

Another example of related sites: cnet.com, zdnet.com, download.com, and shopper.com. Affiliates and dealers could also be grouped this way.

3) Apply the filters you just created to a new profile.

New profile – my colleague Rehan Asif cannot stress this enough!

Congratulation, we have grouped related referring sites as entities!
Now we can look at the traffic from those referring sites at an aggregate level.
Happy, Feras? :)

Stay tuned for the next post on how to group pages based on their functionality. It is actually Avinash’s idea from the previous content grouping post and I promised him that I will write about it.

Finally, do not forget to adjust your clocks this coming Sunday and analyze your performance before and after the change :)

From now until the next blog post, I wish you a happy March and an enjoyable month of analysis :)

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Mar 04
2009

If you want to learn more about Google Analytics and you enjoy online learning, it couldn’t have gotten any easier! Google has just introduced a new online course in Google Analytics implementation, analysis and administration. The cost is $0 so you don’t need your manager’s approval for this one. :)

Google is also offering a Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test as a proof of proficiency in the fundamentals of Google Analytics (GA). For this test there is a $50.00 fee.

What will you learn? A lot!

  • Installation of Google Analytics tracking code (GATC).
  • Familiarity with the GA user interface.
  • Canned reports and how to interpret them.
  • How to set up profiles, filters, goals, funnels, and more.
  • Campaign tracking, eCommerce tracking, and events tracking
  • An entire section on recent features, including custom reports, advanced segments, and motion charts.
  • Cookies, regular expressions (regex), and all the fun stuff to do with tracking mutiple domains and sub-domains.
  • There are also few sections focused purely on analysis of reports.
  • And more!

Our consultants here, including myself, have gone through the curriculum; we liked the structure and the thoroughness of the course. If you are serious about analytics, specifically Google Analytics, I highly recommend you invest some time to take the course.

Depending on where you are in your organization, I see a couple of challenges that you’ll need to overcome:

  • If you are not technical, say your focus is on reporting and analysis, you are going to need some strong coffee as you go through the technical sections (regex, cookies, etc), but you will have a better understanding of the scope of work involved in implementation.
  • If you are technical and focused on implementation challenges, then you’ll probably enjoy getting away from coding for a little bit and seeing how all your hard implementation work is put to use during analysis.

What if you can’t stand staring at a computer screen for hours going through an online course? Othere sources for Google Analytics education and training are available:

Happy learning!

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