School’s out, but the learning never stops

Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer Seminars for Success are a great way to get in-depth, hands-on training on two products that can help you maximize your marketing and website ROI. Seminars are available coast-to-coast all summer long. Starting in June, we have three sets of seminars being held in New York, Phoenix, and Chicago.

Here’s a look at what you’ll learn by attending a seminar with one of our Google Analytics Certified Partners (GACP).

Google Analytics – Introduction & User Training

Whether you’re just getting started or have been involved with Google Analytics for a while, if you’re looking for a thorough training in all of the reports Google Analytics provides, this is the course for you. First, you’ll get a detailed background in the web analytics industry. Then you’ll go through a detailed examination of all of the reports Google Analytics has to offer, with real-world examples of how they can help you. You’ll also learn how to segment your site’s users, spot key trends, and of course, how to take your web analytics data and use it to your advantage.

Google Analytics – Advanced Analysis Techniques

If you’re already familiar with the basics of Google Analytics and are looking to become more sophisticated in your analysis, this course will show you how to do just that. Whether your business goals are user engagement, lead generation, or e-commerce, you’ll benefit from learning how to use the most advanced analysis features of Google Analytics, like Intelligence and Advanced Segmentation.

Google Analytics – Implementation & Advanced Topics

For those who are comfortable with Google Analytics but want to dive deeper into the technical side of GA, this advanced technical implementation course is for you. This training is tailored a bit more toward the tech-savvy, but is extremely valuable to anyone who wants to learn what Google Analytics can do when taken beyond the “plain vanilla” implementation. You’ll go “under the hood” of Google Analytics and learn about filter configuration and setup, opportunities for advanced, custom implementations, as well as the newest beta features that are rolling out.

Website Optimizer

Once you’ve nailed down your Google Analytics implementation, you’re ready to start taking action on your data by testing your website. This interactive training in Google Website Optimizer teaches you how to test your site to improve your users’ experience and your business’s bottom line. Attendees will receive a strong background in landing page testing and testing best practices, many real-world case studies, and an optional, hands-on lab experience in starting both A/B and Multivariate tests.

New York, NY: Register Here

June 8: Google Analytics Introduction & User Training

June 9: Google Analytics Advanced Analysis Techniques

June 10: Google Analytics Implementation & Advanced Topics

Phoenix, AZ: Register Here

June 9: Google Analytics Introduction & User Training

June 10: Google Analytics Implementation & Advanced Topics

June 11: Google Website Optimizer

Chicago, IL: Register Here

June 23: Google Analytics Introduction & User Training

June 24: Google Analytics Implementation & Advanced Topics

June 25: Google Website Optimizer

If these dates don’t work for you, see the complete Seminars for Success schedule.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

New Google Analytics Book Released

A new book by a stellar team is now available for you to take your usage of Google Analytics to the next level. It's called Performance Marketing with Google Analytics, by Sebastian Tonkin (former Googler), Caleb Whitmore of Analytics Pros and Justin Cutroni from WebShare (both Google Analytics Certified Partners). Here's what Sebastian told us about it when we asked him how this book was different from others:

Sebastian: "Google Analytics can save you money! Use it to figure out what works with your online marketing, invest in that, and throw out the rest. This is the focus of our new title on Google Analytics geared toward business people and online marketers with an eye toward the bottom line."

Avinash Kaushik pitched in with a Forward, writing: "The key to real and magnificent success is not the ability to purchase a tool... but rather the ability to ensure a clean implementation and bring to it a mental model that will rock this world. This book is focused, page after detailed page, on doing just that."

See how real-world businesses use Google Analytics to drive online strategy and improve ROI on a daily basis. Follow step-by-step examples and learn how to:

• Track and optimize social media, SEO, email and offline campaigns.
• Maximize ROI on your marketing spend.
• Build a strong team to support Google Analytics inside your organization.
• Get more from your Adwords campaign.
• Use the web to understand what customers want.
• Create customer loyalty on your site.
• Use feedback from users to guide online strategy.
• Win share from competitors.

Caleb went further into depth on the contents: "This book tackles the delicate challenge of teaching how to think as well as what to do.

• The first section focuses on the philosophical, managerial and organizational aspects of succesfully utilizing web analytics technologies to drive greater marketing performance.
• The second section covers the end-to-end of how to plan, install, configure, and use Google Analytics to its fullest capability.
• The final sections then covers application of the concepts and capabilities from the first sections to specific marketing disciplines - site optimization, display and sponsored search ads, organic search engine optimization, offline, email marketing, and more.

The end result: learn how to think, get guidance on setting up Google Analytics correctly, and then discover practical steps to drive higher performance from all aspects of marketing."

Thanks guys, and great work. Grab a copy on Amazon or find out more on the book's companion site, www.analyticsformarketers.com.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Web Analytics TV #9 with Avinash and Nick

This is the 9th exciting episode of Web Analytics TV with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, where you ask questions about web analytics via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them. We had lots of fun putting this episode and we hope you get a kick out of watching it. Here is the list of last week’s questions.

In this action-packed episode we discuss:

• How to track each referral source overtime for visitors
• How to share custom segments and reports with other people
• Getting transaction data for only one referral source
• Is there a place to share Google Analytics code snippets and regular expressions?
• Cross domain tracking when users right-click and open in a new window
• How you need to think about Page Speed and Google Analytics
• Using the comparison report with two date ranges (and hypercube space)
• Sending historical or futuristic data into Google Analytics
• Why eCommerce reports do not match an eCommerce backend system
• Tracking commas instead of decimals for revenue in eCommerce
• Tracking pigViews (just watch the video :-)
• Reporting on content consumption (like pageviews) by keywords
• Setting the visible number of rows in reports
• How to normalize keywords to replace underscore with spaces
• Best practices on upgrading to async tracking code
• Best practices to report on cities in a particular state

If you found this post helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. Or, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site and Avinash and I will answer the newest batch in a couple of weeks with another video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Greater choice and transparency for Google Analytics

Many website owners use Google Analytics and other web analytics tools to make business-critical decisions about how to improve their websites by understanding how users engage with their webpages. We’ve worked hard to make Google Analytics both a robust and reliable web analytics platform while also ensuring the trust and privacy of visitors of these websites. Today we’re taking additional steps to provide even more choice and transparency for both website owners and users.

First, we’re announcing the availability of the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The opt-out provides users with a choice of whether information about website visits is collected by Google Analytics. The add-on stops data from being sent from your computer when you visit websites that use Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js) to track usage. The beta version of the opt-out that we are releasing today is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, and can be downloaded here: tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Additionally, we’re also releasing new functionality for website owners to provide an additional level of privacy for visitors to their sites by offering an option to anonymize IP address information sent to Google. Google Analytics uses the IP address of website visitors to provide general geographic reporting. Website owners can now choose to have Google Analytics store and use only a portion of this IP address for geographic reports. Keep in mind, that using this functionality will somewhat reduce the accuracy of geographic data in your Analytics reports. You can learn how to implement this within your existing Google Analytics installation here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi_gat.html

We’re committed to Google Analytics as an industry-leading web analytics platform that also provides users with transparency and choice when it comes to privacy.

Posted by Amy Chang, Director of Product Management, Google Analytics

It’s now easy to set up new sites with Asynchronous Tracking

We’re happy to announce that the asynchronous tracking tag, which came out of beta last week, is now available in your admin interface when you set up a new profile. This makes it easy for everyone to start off tracking new sites with this very fast, state-of-the-art tag.

Whether you’re tracking a single domain, or a more complex site with multiple subdomains or top level domains, there’s an option in the interface to give you exactly the code you need.

Simply select the scenario that fits your needs. The admin interface now provides the asynchronous tracking code by default, but if you need the traditional tracking snippet you can find it here.

We also encourage you to upgrade your existing sites to the new tag. To help you, we’ve created complete instructions and migration examples.

Enjoy your new, faster site!

Posted by Jesse Savage, Google Analytics Team

Videos From Master Class In Singapore Now Online

Last month we held 3 successful Google Analytics Master Classes in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney. We were pleasantly surprised by the sheer amount of interest in web analytics in this region with close to 1000 advertisers, agencies, bloggers, developers, and technophiles attending the events. For those of you who made it out, we thank you for your participation and interest, and hope you gained valuable insights from our all star team of speakers.

The videos of all the talks from the Singapore event are now available. Each session was kept deliberately short - no speaker goes on longer than 20 minutes - in order to maintain the audience’s interest and to keep the topics flowing at a good pace. Therefore, each video is a good length to watch during work, on break, or at home, enriching your Google Analytics knowledge in convenient bite-sized portions.

Above is Beth Liebert’s (Google Analytics Product Manager, Google) keynote on web analytics. Please surf on over to this post on the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog for the full list of the videos.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, JAPAC Google Analytics Lead, Global Technical Services

Updates To Our Homepage

Take a look at the Google Analytics homepage and you'll notice some small design and content changes that will improve your experience. Besides some under the hood improvements such as HTML5 and CSS2 validation, here are a few of the changes:

• Added dropdowns to the top navigation across the whole site so users can find their way to the content they want better. Try hovering over Product to see a dropdown.
• Updated the features scroller in the middle of the page with a more intuitive UI and cleaner look.
• Updated the News & Hightlights section, which now includes a link to a recent Forrester Research article, "Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics".
• Added a new box to the bottom right that allows the user to flip through our Strategic Solutions, including the recently announced Application Gallery.

Thanks to our fearless webmaster Mike Rigoli for spearheading these. Let us know what you think in comments below, but only if you love it. Joke :-) Enjoy.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Updates To .NET Library For The Export API

We’re incredibly proud of the diversity of applications and tools making use of the Google Analytics Export API. We also know that several of the folks developing these tools have been asking about our .NET client library and requesting sample code.

So we’re happy to announce we’ve updated the .NET Google Data client library to support all our recent features.

In addition, we’ve added 2 reference examples for both the Account Feed and Data Feed which show how to pull advanced segment, custom variable, and goal data from the API. As you can see from the examples, this client library makes pulling data from the Export API incredibly easy.

Now that the .NET developers among you have this library, what will you use it for? Fancy visualizations? Automated reporting? Extreme data mining? Let us know in the comments, or bounce a few ideas off your peers in the GA Data Export API group!

Posted by Alexander Lucas, Google Analytics API Team

New AdWords ID Data in Google Analytics API

Google Analytics helps marketers measure the performance of their ad campaigns. By linking Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, advertisers get a detailed picture of the performance of their ad creatives and keywords. Manually optimizing campaigns works well for the top 100 or 1000 keywords, but can be a challenge for the 1000+ keywords in the long tail.

To help advertisers, we are releasing 5 new dimensions through the Google Analytics API that correlate to the AdWords API IDs.

• ga:adwordsCustomerID
• ga:adwordsCampaignID
• ga:adwordsAdGroupID
• ga:adwordsCriteriaID
• ga:adwordsCreativeID

This allows advertisers to gain new insight by by combining data from Google Analytics and Google AdWords data sets.

Likewise, clients can increase their efficiency by automating reporting using applications. For example, a developer could write an application that ranks all the ad and keyword combinations by bounce rate for the top 50 landing pages, making it easy to identify which ad creatives could be optimized. Running such a report at night would allow an analyst to spend their day focused on optimizing ad creatives to yield real outcomes.

To help you get started quickly, we wrote an article that walks through the steps of joining data from both sources. We also provided the sample application that produces the table above. Here's a sample Java code snippet that shows exactly how to insert the IDs from Google Analytics into a Google AdWords API filter:

  public AdGroupCriterionIdFilter[] getCriterionFilters(DataFeed
     analyticsData) {

   int numFilters = analyticsData.getEntries().size();
   AdGroupCriterionIdFilter[] critFilters = new
       AdGroupCriterionIdFilter[numFilters];

   for (int i = 0; i < numFilters; i++) {

     DataEntry entry = analyticsData.getEntries().get(i);
     Long groupID =     
        Long.parseLong(entry.stringValueOf("ga:adwordsAdGroupID"));
     Long critID =  
        Long.parseLong(entry.stringValueOf("ga:adwordsCriteriaID"));

     AdGroupCriterionIdFilter critFilter = new AdGroupCriterionIdFilter();
     critFilter.setAdGroupId(groupID);
     critFilter.setCriterionId(critID);
     critFilters[i] = critFilter;
   }
   return critFilters;
 }
 

Please keep in mind that all applications that combine data with the AdWords API must follow the AdWords API terms of service.

We're really excited about the new possibilities this data allows. We look forward to hearing how you use it to improve your ad campaigns!

Thanks!

Posted by Alex Lucas, Google Analytics API Team

Google Analytics releases 38 features...

It’s only been a year since we launched the Google Analytics Data Export API and developer programs. To celebrate we are highlighting some of the exciting solutions that extend Google Analytics in our new Google Analytics Application Gallery!

Here are just a few of the exciting applications in the gallery:

Analytics HD

AnalyticsApp is an app for Google Analytics on the iPad!

Analytics Visualizations

The Referrer Flow visualization shows you what sites link to you and which content works best. The Keyword visualization displays the most frequently used search keywords and how they are used together.

BTBuckets

BTBuckets is a free segmentation and optimization webapp that allows sites to create user segments and take actions upon them in real time.

CallTrackID

CallTrackID allows telephone enquiries to be tracked from various traffic routes, including direct, organic, PPC ad, affiliate and offline straight into Google Analytics.

ShufflePoint Studio for PowerPoint

ShufflePoint Studio allows you to associate PowerPoint text, table, and chart placeholders with refreshable Google Analytics data.

The App Gallery makes it easy for customers to find 3rd party solutions that extend Google Analytics in new and useful ways. We also think it’s a great way for developers to find new users and attract more customers. If you’re a developer and you’d like to have your application listed in the gallery, we've created a simple submission form to get your app added.

Finally, if you’re interested in learning more about how you can integrate with Google Analytics, join us for our presentation: Google Analytics: End-to-End on May 20th at Google IO.

Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovksi, Google Analytics API Team

The Growing Google Analytics Ecosystem

Google Analytics is not simply a product but also a growing ecosystem of developers, tools, users, and partners. Today at the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, Brett Crosby made several announcements that highlight this ecosystem.

All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants). And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform. Today, we’re announcing the Google Analytics App Gallery. Among the current list of 32 apps, you’ll find tools like Excellent Analytics, which lets you work with your Analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the Analyticator for Wordpress, which automatically implements Google Analytics across your entire WordPress site. There are many more applications in the gallery, so go take a look. And if you’re a developer, you can learn how to publish apps in the App Gallery here.

Google AdWords is another important part of the ecosystem. Website owners drive traffic using AdWords, and use Google Analytics to understand the performance of that traffic. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs. For a 3-minute overview of what you can accomplish with the new reports, check out this video.

Also, developers can now access AdWords information via the Google Analytics APIs. This makes it much easier to combine your AdWords and Google Analytics data for both analysis and automation. We’re very excited to see third party applications that use this capability to offer new functionality to advertisers. For details, check out this article, which includes a code sample and more, on Google Code.

Also part of the AdWords/Analytics ecosystem, AdWords Search Funnels was announced one month ago, and today is available in all AdWords accounts. We’re also making two short tips videos available (tip 1 and tip 2) that illustrate just a couple of the ways you can use Search Funnels.

Finally, supporting the ecosystem of all websites using Google Analytics, the new faster page tag comes out of beta. The asynchronous tracking snippet will soon be the default snippet when you set up a new profile. This new page tag will speed up your site and every site that uses Google Analytics across the web. If you want to upgrade from your existing tag (which we highly recommend), you can learn how to do that here.

We'll follow up with deep dive posts on each of these topics next week. Thanks for being part of the ecosystem.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

New Name and New Badges for Authorized Consultants

Your friendly neighborhood Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program is getting a new costume and superhero name, though their powers will remain the same. (Read: we are renaming the program and with that comes a shiny new logo - we think of our partners as superpowered).

Our partners are now called Google Analytics Certified Partners. Here's the new logo:

If you are looking for help with your Google Analytics account, look for companies that display this Google Analytics Certified Partners logo. Companies displaying this logo have met our rigorous requirements demonstrating a level of expertise, agreed to our terms and conditions, and have proven experience to work with you.

Yes, we’ve made them jump through hoops because it’s important that we vet the best to service you. We don’t take it lightly because optimizing your Google Analytics account is serious business. So, whether it’s a quick consultation, help with an implementation or tracking a campaign, or long term support or training - look for companies that display the new logo. The new logos include a "Click to Verify" element that takes you to a listing on our partner page for more information.

You can find the latest list of Google Analytics Certified Partners here. The new logo is part of our plan to produce consistent naming and badging for all Google product partner programs.

Posted by Eva Woo, Google Analytics Team