I’m also interested in hearing from people who are using Google Optimizer. If you’re also headed there, or want to chat about optimizer, drop me a line! forrestanalytics @ gmail.com

See you at eMetrics!

Top 3 Insights:

1. Data Presentation is Key

I was struck by the passion Avinash shows towards—not analytics or the data itself—but towards how data is presented to its consumers. He claims that if you spend ½ of that weekly “here’s the web data” meeting explaining what Bounce Rate, Unique Visitor, or Abandonment actually mean, you’re wasting your time. You’re not progressing forward, you’re actually regressing each week since in a major way you’re failing to communicate the real meaning of your numbers to others.

When you hand people crap, they’ll ask stupid questions in an attempt to seek clarity. When you give them well formatted data, they won’t ask you as many stupid questions. It’s a waste of your time, and moreover, the precious time you have on this earth, to be answering the same questions every week. You can’t progress forward if that keeps happening.

This is one of the reasons Avinash see’s Contextual Data is “King” and why the GA folks are putting a huge effort into this idea. Data without context is useless. A good example of that is the Visitors Overview report. It doesn’t just give you the total amount visitors from a certain time period, and spit out the related graph above. No, it shows you–get ready for this good metaphor credited to Avinash—the “boyfriend or girlfriend” metrics that go together with the Visitor number, like Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, etc. Sometimes numbers can be useless if they’re not presented next to other relevant information.

For a startling example on how data presentation can change meaning, check out this amazing Hans Rosling TED talk.

2. Web Optimizer is Where it’s at

I was surprised to see Avinash show almost more enthusiasm and interest in the Google Website Optimizer than in GA itself. He thinks everyone should be using it. He even said something like (paraphrasing) “Spend a couple weeks getting familiar with GA, then start using optimizer!”

I asked him what sort of traffic numbers a site needs to be able to see a “signal” (stat. sig results) in a reasonable amount of time. It seems like with the amount of traffic my startup sees, we may be looking at tests that last as long as month before we get results. I’ll have to dig deeper on that but I definitely want to use this free tool soon.

3. His Number One Tip

Little old me forced him to answer the following question:

What’s your number one tip for people just starting out using Google Analytics?

His answer, after mulling that over for a couple of seconds, was: pay attention to Bounce Rate! He writes a great post about Bounce Rate here, that if you haven’t already, I demand you to leave this humble blog in your dust and read now.  At its essence, Bounce Rate is a startlingly revealing metric bound to shock the novice user like a sudden bucket of cold water over the head.

Overall, I was also struck by how modest and humble Avinash is, as well as his overwhelming agnostic devoutness to the field of analytics. I also want to thank him for coming out to talk for free, and for answering everyone’s questions so honestly.

Also, welcome to my blog! My main objective is to share as many Google Analytics (GA) “Tips and Tricks” with you as possible.

Read a bit about me here.

See you all at e-Metrics!

Event Details:

What’s New with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer?
Wednesday, April 16: 9:30 – 10:30 am
Thursday, April 17: 12:00 – 1:00 pm (Repeat Session)

Successful Web Analytics – presented by Avinash Kaushik
Thursday, April 17: 3:15 – 4:45 pm

See you there!

I’m hoping one of my brilliant, insightful, and whimsical entries below win me entrance gratis into the upcoming May 5-7 (check) eMetrics conference here in San Francisco!

This was a ton of fun to write. Here they are:

When clean metrics are
left all alone, the God of
analytics cries.

Browse, Shop, Preview, Buy;
the happy path to the cart.
How I wish for thee!

Avinash should be
happy, since I use GA,
an hour a day.

1. Load Up On Blank Profiles

Create “Blank” profiles that are capturing data before you need them. This is like putting money in the bank before you need for it; it will be waiting for you when you do. Data will start flowing and be collected there. If you don’t do this, any new profile you create will start collecting data the day you create it—the downfall being weeks or months of lost data between the creation of your original profiles and your new profiles.

Remember to apply the general filters you’ve applied to your other profiles, so that the data flowing in will be clean. Common filters to apply are excluding your companies IP addresses, including traffic coming from your QA environment.

I have 8 blank profiles I literally name: “1.1 Blank, 1.2 Blank, 1.3 Blank” etc. You can change the profile name at any time.

2. Flex Your RegEx

Regular Expressions are an extremely useful and necessary evil in order to get the most use out of your filters, profiles, reports, and most of all, your conversion goals. Learn up. Remember, they’re not as hard as you think, and knowing the 3 most common ones will get you 90% of the way there. For a great how-to check out the Luna Metrics series on RegEx’s here.

3. Use and Abuse Profiles

Don’t be shy about creating multiple profiles. They’re one of your most useful weapons. They’re versatile since you can use filters to alter what they’re telling you, but moreover, they’re necessary if you want to track more than 4 Conversion Goals–which you definitely should be doing.

4. Read Up

There’s a slew of great blogs and forums out there that will help anyone get up to speed fast. I’ll Soon post my favorites here.

5. Get be Afraid to Get Technical

They say Google is a engineering driven organization. GA is evidence of that. What other analytics tool out there practically forces marketers to learn things like Regular Expressions? Or tempts us to install FireBug?! If you’re on “the business” side of the house, and want to make serious headway with GA, study up on the technical side of things. A great and clear resource to do that through is Justin’s e-book. You can read more about it here. It’s saved my sanity many of times.

How about you? Is there some tip or trick you wish someone had shared with you? Leave it in a comment below.

The goal of this blog is to supercharge your knowledge of Google Analytics. I want to help you to get the most out of this free, but flawed, tool by sharing my learning experiences with you.

Most of all I want this to be a fun and useful reference for the thousands of people out there using Google Analytics.

I hope you enjoy!