Customer Reviews

Google Analytics 2.0

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have read a ton of guides and information on Google Analytics, have taken a 6 week training course (provided by ROI Revolution who happen to be mentioned in this book as it would have it) and have used it for my companies sites as well as some of my clients. I had never read the first version of this book due to the not-so-flattering reviews of it so I decided to take a look at the latest version to see what it had to offer and if it had any useful content I had missed.

After reading it I would say that it is a useful basic guide for anyone getting started with Google Analytics as well as for those looking to brush up on their knowledge and to have a handy guide. There are also some solid, advanced topics they cover in the book such as regular expressions, advanced filters, as well as many side bars and notes during chapters. However,some of these advanced topics feel like they have been thrust upon the reader under the assumption that the reader already has some understanding of some of the advanced topics. I feel as there was not enough back-story to properly introduce some of their advanced topics and many times the location of these advanced topics messed with the flow of the book; they were introduced at times when the section of the book you were reading was rather basic.

The flow of the book (and the interesting tone at some points) seemed a bit off to me and one of the biggest things in Google Analytics was completely left out or barely even touched upon and that was setting up tracking for an E-Commerce site. There is a lot that goes into this (though it is not necessarily difficult but there are many different variables and codes you will need to know and utilize) and you truly need to assess your website and how it is structured before setting up the tracking code, the hidden form and some of the other utm functions (too little time and space to explain all that here). I was very surprised, and quite dissapointed actually, this was completely left out as it it really is a huge part of Google Analytics. They also did not mention or explain many of the other different variables and codes that allow you to more fully take advantage of Google Analytics and make it work just right for you and your business.

Not a bad basic guide to have handy for understanding the reports and some other things but really surprised at how much they left out for the sake of some of the really basic stuff they left in or espoused upon way too much. There are other resources you will need to truly grasp the whole setup process for more complex websites; this book makes it all seem so simple and basic as it doesn't explain that all too well.

This is the updated version of the same title, which was released over a year ago. I complained about a few things, which were corrected or included in this updated version of the book. For this reason am I giving this version 5 stars instead of just 4 as I did for the previous version.

Also added were some tips that go beyond Google Analytics, including tips for the use of another free analytics tool that lets you analyse the web server log-files on your own server.

If you are a user of the free Google Analytics service, you are probably on a tight budget or just started out to get your head around the subject of web analytics. The features of Google Analytics multiplied over the past years since Google bought Urchin Software, which became Google Analytics.

You can hire Google Analytics certified consultants, but they are not cheap. You are better off to spend the few dollars on this book first, because with its help are you probably able to figure out most of the things yourself. You can still hire an expensive external consultant for the really tricky stuff afterwards.

If you are new to web analytics in general, I would also suggest to get Web Analytics: An Hour a Day to learn about web analytics in general. All software and tools are useless, if you don't know what you want to use them for.

There is a ton of out-of-the-box functionality built into Google Analytics, but if a user never goes beyond that they will miss out on some of the biggest benefits that can be found in features like goals, and custom filters. These features can be used to track the success of your web site, your marketing efforts, and your products and services ... which could be important. This book presents these fairly complex concepts in plain language that anyone who is fairly technical can understand.

The book also explains how to setup profiles and other users so that multiple people in an organization can have access to the reports. This is pretty easy to do, but again the book explains it in such a way that almost anyone can understand the importance of assigning users to a particular profile and the differences in roles (i.e. reports only or account administrator).

It also walks you through each report section of Google Analytics, and gives you an overview of what each report is displaying, it's drill-down capabilities, and any assumptions or "gotchas" that might exist to help you understand the data behind the report. It also points out a few real-world business uses of a few of the reports, and how you can leverage a particular report to make business or design decisions ... which also could be important.

Overall, I think this is an essential manual for anyone who wants to get the most out of Google Analytics. Like I said, the software really has a lot of power and functionality out-of-the-box, but if you can go beyond that into some of the more custom features you will get a lot more value out of it ... and this book helps you get there. Its an easy, light read and most people can probably read it in just a few sittings. I would recommend it to anyone in your organization that is going to ever log into Google Analytics.

http://www.stuffthatjustworks.com/2007/11/11/GoogleAnalytics20.aspx

This book is rich with information about how to read Google Analytics reports, and how to code your site so you'll get the reports you want. If you're an IT geek (especially an IT geek young enough to read the impossibly small type in the screen shots), you'll enjoy this book.

If you're looking a strategic or practical introduction to Google Analytics, you're out of luck.

The book gets off to a slow start, discussing another product (AW Stats) for two of the first three chapters.

Chapter 4 tells you how to sign up for Google Analytics. But really: if you can't figure out how to sign up for it, perhaps you should just hire someone to handle it for you. Chapter 5 presents "the dashboard" in all its obvious glory.

If you're not bored witless by now, the next chapter (Filtering Your Data) ought to do it for you. Though there are examples, they're basic and obvious. If you'd like examples of filters that give real marketing insight into your site's visitors, you'll have to find another book.

The same thing applies to the next chapter: Using Analytics Goals. The book tells you how to set up goals using Google Analytics, but if you're trying to figure what your site's goals should be, no joy.

Bottom line: There is a lot of information in this book, but unless you're an IT staffer looking for geeky tips, it's hard to put it to much use.

Once you get through the first half of the book - which is almost all an introduction to Analytics it starts to get useful.

Too much info on Filters in Analytics (30 pages or 10% of the book). I also find the images too small and therefore hard to read and yet these images are a vital part of the learning as you need to see the image content to understand what is happening and what you are supposed to copy.

In general I would recommend purchasing this book if you need an intro to Analytics but would find another source for really advanced operation of this incredible Google product.

Before reading this book, I didn't even think anyone could write a whole book about a free service that looked pretty simple to understand. I mean, hey all you need to know is how many people visit the site and from where, right? Wrong! Read along and I will tell you what I learned.

I think by now a lot of people have heard about google's free service to track information about your website. Perhaps you even already have it installed. I like most people always knew statistics about our websites to be very important in figuring out if people are actually visiting websites we spent so long to create. That and its just fun to see the numbers, especially when they are increasing. Beyond that I have never really paid much attention to any of the other numbers, mostly due to not knowing what they stood for or just thinking they didn't matter much.

Well let me just say that after reading 300 or so pages about google analytics, I have a very different opinion on the matter. I had google analytics installed before on other websites, but i didn't know about all the features or what was really important to track.

[...]

I welcomed the arrival of Google Analytics 2.0 after having found the preceding edition to be very useful. The authors walk the reader through the basics of web analytics, going into as much detail as a novice would need to set up your first Google Analytics account, dissecting the platform section by section and not skimming when it comes to dealing with the advanced topic of Goal Setting, arguably one of the toughest (and most important) things you can do with Google Analytics.

The one downside of this book is the same problem any book dealing with software has: it will get outdated, which is the reason why the authors published this new edition. Outside of this, it's an excellent reference for anyone seeking to become familiarized with analytics at large and, specifically, with how the world's best free analytics package (and one of the best ones, including those that you pay for!) -Google Analytics. Take my word for it: I have been a Google Analytics user since I could get my hands on it and a WebTrends user (a very expensive alternative) since 2002.

I bought this book for a web analytics class and had been experiementing with Google Analytics already. The book covers just about every facet of Google Analytics, the tools they provide and the style and ways they represent them to you. They book also covers areas for marketing managers and administrators to use Google Analytics as a strategic tool to its maximum potential.

I'd recommend this book for anyone wanting to the ins and outs of Google Analytics, great reference book as well if you're using Google Analytics all the time.

If you are wanting to learn how to get useful analytics from Google Analytics this book will NOT meet your needs. This book is just too basic. I am not kidding about the boss comment in my subject line. This book does provide just enough information about the pluses and minuses of Google Analytics and other web logging software to effectively set the proper expectation level for your boss. For that reason I gave it a three star rating. So much has been written about Google Analytics that many bosses think that it should tell them what time their client ate their toast in the morning while viewing your organization's website. If you are looking to get quality metrics from Google Analytics, I would recommend that you get Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton instead. Also , Web Analytics an Hour a Day is an exceptional book too and will provide you with a very solid foundation and understanding of web analytics.

I found nothing particularly insightful in this book. Should be less "how to" and more "why".