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Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics | 
 enlarge | Author: Brian Clifton
Publisher: Sybex
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $20.50
You Save: $19.49 (49%)
New (35) Used (11) from $20.50
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 5083
Media: Paperback
Pages: 364
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0470253126
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.3
EAN: 9780470253120
Publication Date: March 31, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New. Bought for a course but did not use
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Product Description
Let Web metrics expert Brian Clifton help you maximize your website's potential. In this book you'll discover the information you need to get a true picture of your site's impact and stay competitive using Google Analytics. Featuring implementation techniques not documented elsewhere, this informative guide teaches you how to turn data into actionable information and optimize the user experience of your website for better conversions. You'll learn to: - Measure your web traffic, its sources and visitor engagements and understand its impact on ROI
- Configure your data collection parameters to track all online marketing channels, Flash events, banners, and more
- Follow best practices for tracking offline activities and learn how to extract, analyze, and integrate the collected data
- Optimize checkout systems, pay-per-click campaigns (including AdWords), SEO, and email marketing efforts
- Discover the benefits of ad version testing and the insight multivariate testing can bring
With a better understanding of your website visitors, you will be able to tailor page content and marketing budgets with laserlike precision for a better return on investment, and ultimately, a better bottom line.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
Highly Recommended May 18, 2008
David Cross (London, UK)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I've been running Google Analytics on a number of web sites since it was first released in 2005. I've got a lot of good information out of it, but I've always suspected that I'm not using it to its full potential. Having read this book I now have a much better idea of what I'm missing and, more importantly, how I can put that right.
Brian Clifton has written a really useful guide to getting the most benefit out of Google's free web analytics system. He is, of course, well-placed to do that as he leads the Google Analytics team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Part one is a good overview of web analytics is. Chapter one explains what web analytics is and what you can get out of it. Chapter two goes into more detail about the method that people use to analyse their web site traffic and chapter three introduces Google Analytics and explains where it fits into the web analytics landscape.
Part two gives an introduction to using Google Analytics. Chapter four looks at the interface to Google Analytics. This chapter gives the reader a good free for the interactivity of the Google Analytics interface. It's this interactivity that makes Google Analytics far easier to use than many of its competitors. Chapter five looks in more depth at ten of the reports that the system generates. By the end of this chapter I was already learning new little tips about the system.
Part three is about implementing Google Analytics on your web site. chapter six shows you how to tag your web pages so they are included in your reports. This is about as far as my Google Analytics knowledge goes. So chapter seven introduces ways to customise the Google Javascript code in order to have more control over what data is recorded, it was all new (and very interesting). For example, the chapter has techniques for measuring page load time and tracking outgoing links. Chapter eight is all about Google Analytics best practices and is full of the kinds of tips that only an expert in using the tool would be able to share with you. Having read this chapter I configured up some of my sites to track search queries and set up more goals on my sites. Chapter nine is called "Google Analytics Hacks" and is a really useful cookbook of tips and techniques for getting even more out of Google Analytics. Top of my list of things to implement from this chapter is to add tracking to all of my error pages.
The sections we've discussed so far have all been about generating as much useful data about your web site traffic as possible. But, of course, huge piles of data don't do you any good at all unless you can make some sense of the data and then act on your findings. This is what part four is about. Chapter ten offers some useful hints on how to make sense of all of the data you have collected. Clifton looks at a web site from a number of points of view (sales, marketing, web content creator and webmaster) and for each of them suggests a number of key performance indicators that will be of interest to them. He then shows how to construct these KPIs out of the data that Google Analytics has captured. Chapter eleven moves on to the next stage and looks a number of real-world examples where data from Google Analytics can be used to identify poor performance from areas of a web site and suggests ways to improve matters.
I'm no web analytics expert and, to be honest, some of the stuff in part four made my eyes glaze over a little. But my company doesn't rely on its web site for income so I've never had to worry about the number of visitors I get or how long they spend on the site. Web analytics has really just been a hobby for me. If I was in a company where those kinds of things were important, then I feel confident that this book would be the right one to turn to in order to learn more. This book certainly goes into more depth when talking about both the technical side of Google Analytics and how to interpret the data than any other book I've read on the subject.
This book has taught me a lot of new and interesting things about Google Analytics and I feel sure that I'll be going back to it in the future when I need to know more. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to get the most out of their Google Analytics installation.
Excellent documenation of Google Analytics April 14, 2008
Andreas Ramos (Palo Alto, California)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Very good documentation of Google Analytics. It's the manual we've all be waiting for. Excellent details on advanced filters and configuration. I recommend it as a must-have book if you're working with Google Analytics. Business/marketing people won't get much out of this. It's a bit too technical for them.
Helpful book from knowledgable author May 11, 2008
B. J. George (New Zealand)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I stumbled upon the authors' site while trying to learn more about Google Analytics. After reading a few of his posts and learning that he was (until recently) quite high up on the totem pole in the Web Analytics team at google, I decided to purchase his new book, and I'm very glad I did.
I found it to be very useful and easy to read, despite parts of it being somewhat complex -- as I was hoping for given the title. The use of screen shots was excellent. I often found myself relating pages of the book to my own analytics account and in doing so gaining a better understanding of my own data and a better comprehension of what the book was talking about.
The book also provides some practical solutions to some common (but semi-advanced) issues that are not covered in any official google documentation, however if you have been faced with the specific issues, you would likely have found the answer in analytics blogs online if you searched enough. Having said that, if you had this book, you wouldn't have needed to search in the first place.
At the time I read the book I had been using analytics for about a year. I am very happy with the book -- I only wish I had it earlier when I didn't know quite as much, then I would have gotten even more value from it.
Phenomenal-- but there is one big caveat. April 22, 2008
Alex B (Toronto)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Brian Clifton's Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics should, for all intents and purposes, have the term "Advanced" in bold, possibly in a gigantic type font with fun colours and exclamation marks.
The first 3-5 chapters start innocently enough, and if you have been involved in web analytics or read any other material on the topic you will find it largely rehashes what you already know with a few nuggets of gold throughout. For instance, Brian's discussion as it pertains to Google's tracking of data and its privacy implications offers a wonderful metaphor relating to personal identifiable information, though his emphasis curiously seems to be trying to convince the reader, rather than positioning it as a tool that one can use to assuage stakeholders or individuals who are not sold on analytics.
Chapter 4, which aforementioned is innocent enough, gives one a glimpse of what is to come when Brian delves into a discussion on regular expressions (in order to filter data via GA's inline filter). If you are unfamiliar with a command line interface, advanced search expressions or anything of the sort, good luck. Even if you are, this section comes WAY out of left field and perhaps could have been saved for later, but the information itself is useful and I've been utilizing a number of the expressions ever since.
Chapter 7 is where this book really begins, and Brian starts it off by giving an in depth explanation of how Google tracks pages and summarily applies that logic to show how one can track things like dynamic URL's (rewriting them along the way), tracking file downloads, partially completed forms (cool stuff), and E-Commerce settings (with some neat tricks and workarounds for frequent issues and problems), Flash, and a whole host of things. All of this is done very clearly, but if you don't have some technical aptitude/background, you're going to struggle.
After the largely technical Chapter 7, Brian shifts back into a less technically focused discussion on best practices, including a fantastic write up on goals and funnels (including excellent examples for both). His knowledge and ability to write in a clear form is particularly visible when he discusses segmentation, which, while other authors have done a good job championing, Brian, at least to me, easily blows them out of the water. If you're not technically inclined, this is a great section, though you may still be a bit perturbed by the depth of the filter settings.
Chapter 9 is worth the purchase of this book alone, IF you can follow it. For reference, it's prefaced with the words "In this chapter I assume you have a strong understanding of JavaScript" and it holds true. In this chapter you learn a whole whack of cool things, and I literally have a pile of notes sitting on my desk as a result. Brian goes into everything from adding custom search engines to your GA results, tracking error pages and broken links and tracking referral url's from pay-per-click networks to differentiating links to the same page via site overlay. There's just tons of great tricks and tips in this section, and it's clear to anyone with a clue that not only does the author of this section have an understanding of Google that vastly exceeds your own, but that he can write about it in a clear, easy to understand (given the nature of the topic) way.
Chapter's 10 and 11 are also excellent, and one does not need to be overly technical to understand them. The former discusses KPI's in an extremely clear, helpful manner and even discusses creating reports based on specific job roles. In the process, Brian reveals a bunch of custom KPI's that he has created that are fantastic--which is to say, if you are reading this section do not skip a job role just because it's not applicable, there's lots of gold to be mined.
Chapter 11 focuses on real world tasks, such as diagnosing problem pages, delves deeper into funnels and how to use Google optimizer and is a great read that, no matter who you are, I promise you will learn something from.
In summary, if you are technically inclined and can follow some of the more esoteric topics, this book is an absolute must have--buy it right now. If you are not so technically inclined, there is still lots of value in chapters, 8, 10 and 11 which in my opinion still would merit a purchase, but of course, you are not getting the same value. So, as I said to begin this admittedly long review, this book is phenomenal, but there is one big caveat. You need to have some technical knowledge to truly appreciate how much valuable information it provides.
Hands-On Guide with Useful Tips from an Insider May 15, 2008
Carsten Cumbrowski (Fresno, CA USA)
The book was written by Brian Clifton, who actually works for Google itself, as a team leader for the Google Analytics team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It is basically information from the source itself.
You could expect a sales pitch for the Google product, but this is not the case here. Well, there is also not too much profit to be made from writing a self serving book that is designed to sell the product, because Google Analytics is a free web analytics solution that does not cost a dime to use.
The book is a hands-on guide for how to use Google Analytics and in my opinion more geared towards the webmasters who have some technical understanding, basic knowledge in HTML and JavaScript and the folks who are doing the actual implementation and configuration of the web analytics solution.
It is full of specific and practical tips and uses real world examples to not only demonstrate the "how-to", but to illustrate and explain the "why-to" as well. It includes source code samples, which are often virtually ready to be used for your own site.
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