Ambient and Transparent

Don’t miss out! GAACs are in town and Google is sponsoring this Web Analytics Wednesday. If you haven’t signed up yet, it is not too late to sign up here

I am pretty sure you’ll have a lot of fun, network with your industry colleagues, and even an opportunity to get some of your GA questions answered

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Venue: Gordon Biersch
Address: 640 Emerson Street, Palo Alto, CA

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google, google analytics, tips for internet consultants, web analytics, web analytics wednesday

eMetrics is where the big web analytics announcements are made! This is just announced, really just announced, and it is very exciting. Google announced the roll out of a new set of enterprise-class features that will complement the already feature-rich Google Analytics. In the next few days, our Google Analytics team here at E-Nor will be writing more detailed posts about each of the features. Until then, here is a quick summary.

So what is new?

• Custom reports. Many of us would like to create their own reports with their own key metrics and don’t want to be limited to the default reports in GA. This feature is quite user-friendly and allows you to drag-and-drop to create all kinds of reports!

• Advanced Segmentation. Want to analyze “visits with transactions” or your “organic (non-paid) visits” without creating separate profiles? The Advanced Segmentation feature gives the data and reports you need. Many data subsets now come ready for you without any additional effort. For those of us that used to create ten or so profiles to segment data, you can now enjoy your morning latte instead :), and focus on analysis instead of process.

• Google Analytics API. According to Google, the API is in private beta (meaning a small number of companies/developers have access to it). Once the API is rolled out, expect some very creative custom reporting and very useful third-party data integration.

• Enhanced User Interface. A much cleaner Google Analytics admin interface. Allows a snapshot view of accounts and profiles with metrics right there in front of you. We will have a detailed post on this later today.

• Motion Charts. Part-cool, part-crazy, this amazing tool allows you to see data in 5 dimensions! Data can now be visually displayed on the traditional X and Y axes but there’s also additional time, color, and size dimensions!  The Motion chart is extremely useful for spotting peaks and valleys in data and identifying areas which should be analyzed deeper. While it comes with a slight learning curve or adjustment to get yourself familiar with the interface and how to best use the 5 dimensions, there’s no other tool that will give you this type of insight. It’s extremely fun & creative to use and quite interactive. If you’re not a data lover, it actually makes the data fun to use and easily spot trends that would take much longer (and be far more mundane) with a report of numbers. My kids would love this!

• Integration with Google AdSense (in private data). More detailed reports and opportunities to enhance performance and continue with on-going optimization.

Feel free to contact one of our Google Analytics Consultants at info at e-nor com and we will try to help you out.

Also, our friend Avinash has posted a very nice post (yes, long, but easy and a good read).

Stay tuned for more!!!

The E-Nor Google Analytics Team

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: custom reporting, google, google adsense, google analytics, web analytics

Yesterday I attended the Conversion University conference at Google here in Mountain View. Avinash had a couple of very informative sessions on creating a “data driven” culture in your organization (or your clients’ organization). I really recommend you get his book, Web Analytics - An Hour A Day, if you haven’t done so.

These sessions will soon be available on YouTube and the sessions from the previous Conversion University Day have been available for a while now. Even if you are not using Google Analytics, the sessions are still very applicable.

There were a number of very informative sessions on Adwords, Google Website Optimizer (GWO), GA Hacks , a number of case studies, as well as a review of the new features that will be rolled out soon in Google Analytics.

There were also a number of very friendly and helpful Google engineers and specialists that were around to answer questions from the audience in the breaks and in the lab time.

Many thanks to Brett, Jeff, and the others who put this event together.

PS. Lunch was excellent too!

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: conversion, google, google adwords, google analytics, google website optimizer, web analytics