A little more than a month ago, I wrote a post titled, “Top Resources For Google Analytics Training” in which I referenced some resources that I thought were quality training documents and offered the level of detail that was necessary to use Google Analytics effectively. One of the resources that I mentioned was a book  titled “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics” by Brian Clifton. Well in less than 8 hours I received an e-mail in my inbox from Brian regarding my post and that he was publishing a new edition of his book that was due to be released in March of 2010 that was almost a total rewrite of the first edition due to how much has changed in the industry in less than two years. This response from Brian Clifton in such a short period of time makes it clear that he is using Google Alerts or some other form reputation management software to manage his online reputation and he is taking it very seriously. Impressive!

I was given a preview of the intro, Chapter 1, and Chapter 10 of the book and very solid information. Depending on your level of understanding of Google Analytics or any other analytics software, then Chapter 1 will be a refresher on many topics you already know, but a good refresher because often when are so close to topics on a daily basis, some of th basic fundamentals can be taken for granted. The first chapter focuses on why web metrics are important and the reports that are available in Google Analytics. This chapter also highlighted some of the limitations in Google Analytics reporting which has always been a problem for me. Several times throughout the chapter, Brian demonstrates calculations that are valuable to assessing your traffic, but the calculation must be done in Excel because it is not available in GA. That has been my gripe is that most of the reports require some manipulation in Excel in order to format and calculate the data in a way that is most meaningful for your organization. Obviously, Google can not create a custom dashboard with custom metrics for every user and the custom reports that were made available last year have helped a lot, there are still some calculations that would be really valuable in GA that are currently not available. Brian walks you through which calculations may be important and how to perform them.

Brian also sets the tone for preparing different metrics for different levels of your organization as the webmaster should not be concerned with the same metrics as the CEO and vice versa. To get buy-in on investments in your web properties, it is necessary to speak to each level of the organization with the level of detail that will interest them and allow them to make solid, data-driven business decisions. When ideas are supported with verifiable data, then it is much easier to make decisions because results are quantifiable. The value in all analytics is the ability to measure behavior and adjust accordingly and arguably most importantly is the ability to communicate those successes throughout your organization.

Chapter 10 was the other chapter I was provided and it was very helpful for me as it focused on a few aspects that I believe are the keys to valuable analytics information which are visitor segmentation, goal setting, and then the actions that you take based on the data that you have. Not to go into crazy detail because I would not do the book justice and Brian has covered this topic in great detail, but the overall theme is that every visitor is not created equal. Measuring visitors in buckets based on how they arrived at your site, how frequently they visit, and the actions they performed on your site will provide valuable insight into what is working properly on your site from a user experience perspective and what needs to be improved. Segmentation also helps to focus resources so that the most time and money are directed at the segments that offer the most ROI. Brian details how to measure this using goals and key performance indicators(KPI’s). Building on the theme from the first chapter, which I am sure continues throughout the other chapters, is using the data and KPI’s for different parts of your organization which is no easy task. The organizations that can communicate this effectively and gain support from all of the stakeholders in a organization typically make changes and the proper investment in their web properties to be most successful. Those that simply measure all visitors the same, never dive much deeper than pageviews and visitor counts, and refuse to set goals and values on actions that are completed stagnate their growth and lose valuable business from the website every day.

Needless to say, I appreciate Brian Clifton giving me the opportunity to preview his book an I look forward to it’s release in the coming weeks, but don’t buy this book until March 2010 when the new version is released. Brian Clifton is an ex-Google employee that worked closely with Google Analytics during his stint at Google and that experience coupled with his passion for web analytics has helped him produce another great book. For anyone truly interested in how to use Google Analytics effectively and go further under the hood than just viewing the dashboard, I would definitely recommend this book. I would also recommend Brian’s blog , Advanced Web Metrics, be added to you reader for good information as well.

WordPress is a terribly easy platform to use, but it requires installing some additional plugins to activate the functionality that you need to make your site run smoothly. Adding plugins is only an option if you are using the self-hosted installation of WordPress from WordPress.org and not the hosted option at WordPress.com.

Here is a list of 10 plugins that I believe are necessary for your site. This is only a small list as there are thousands of plugins available that can perform almost any task that you can think of. All of them do not work perfectly and mainly this is due to them being open source and anyone can create a plugin, but they do not always work correctly. Especially if you are on a version of WordPress that is higher than the plugin was created for. Fortunately, most of the developers are very good about upgrading their plugins to work with the latest version of the software.

The ten essential WordPress Plugins are:

Akismet

Akismet comes installed with your WordPress installation and only requires an API key for activation. Akismet prevents your blog from being overwhelmed with spam as it checks the commenters information against their database to determine if it is spam or not. You still have to go in and manually approve/disapprove spam though. If you do not have Akismet active, you will quickly find out how much spam your blog will receive very quickly. This plugin is a must have.

Tweet This
This plugin adds the “tweet this” widget to each of your post so that your visitors can share your story with their twitter followers if they are so inclined. This plugin works well and what I like most is that you can set which URL shortening service that you want to use. TinyURL is used as the default, but the plugin supports several other options.

All in One SEO Pack
All-in-One SEO pack is the most widely use SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. It adds fields to your admin panel where you can easily add custom title, description, and keyword tags to each of your posts. It also has an option where you can have the plugin use your tags and categories as your meta tags. This is definitely a must-have to get your site optimized for the search engines.

Brian’s Threaded Comments
Have you ever seen a comment on a blog that you wanted to respond to, but there would be twenty other responses between your response and it would not be clear that you are responding to that commenter? This plugin solves that problem so that you can respond to someone else’s comments and the comment will be listed right below the previous comment. This is a great plugin for making your comments section more conversational.

Comment Relish
Comment Relish sends a short e-mail to users who comment on your blog for the first time to say thank you. You can customize your message to say whatever you like so that it matches your writing style and fits your readers. The downside is that if you have a lot of comments, it can cause your site and server to run more slowly. For smaller sites, it should not be a problem.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Feedburner is a RSS platform that lets you customize how your feed will appear, monetize your feed, and track readership statistics for your feed. Every blog should have a feed and since Feedburner(owned by Google) is the best RSS platform, this plugin should be used.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Instead of simply adding Google Analytics through your theme editor, this plugin makes it simple to add the code, but also gives the functionality to allow you to track extra search engines, click outs, and downloads. It makes some of the stats understandable for people that may not be very knowledge about Google analytics.

Google XML Sitemaps
Generates an XML sitemap for your blog used by search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. What’s an XML sitemap, you ask? Basically it’s a file that tells the search engines which pages on your site are most important and which they should crawl on a regular basis.

Subscribe To Comments

Allows commentators to receive e-mail notifications of new comments on an article (checkbox option in the comments form) on which they have posted a comment.This is a great way to get people back to your site and continue the conversation.

WP Contact Form III
Adds in a simple contact page on your blog with a form for name, email, website, subject, and message. This one isn’t as fancy as the other contact plugins out there but it’s simple and easy to use and most importantly works properly. You also have the option of adding multiple forms to your site using this plugin.

This is just a short list of plugins that I have found very useful. I use many more and may detail them as well at some point. By visiting the WordPress Plugins directory, you should b able to find any plugin that you need. If not, discuss it in the forums and most likely there is someone out that will develop it pretty soon.

For reporting purposes, when you export data from Google Analytics, the information is not in the format or structure that you need. Google Analytics is a little limited on the reporting functionality and often requires some manipulation in Microsoft Excel to massage the data in the the format you need.

Often I am trying to find a text string within a dataset without being able to match the entire string.

What I am trying to do is determine if a value from a list exists in a range of columns and return a value from a corresponding column.

In my list from sheet 1 column A I have values like:
U04370
W71191
X770DJ

In sheet 2 I will have in column A:
TESTING INC #U04370 / JMO  / BLISH-MIZE
TESTING INC #X848MM/RADIUS /WEGMAN’S FOOD 
TESTING INC #W71191/INFOL/FIELD CONTAINER 
TESTING INC #X770DJ/PROPH/MAGNUS INDUSTRIES
TESTING INC #X9950H/RUSH /ODOMS TENNESSEE PRIDE 

and in sheet 2 Column B I will have
28832
46375
47524
49119
49166

I want to return to sheet 1 column B the value from sheet 2 column B when sheet 1 column A is contained in sheet 2 column A.

This function helps to solve that problem

=INDEX(Sheet2!$B$2:$B$6,MATCH(“*”&A2&”*”,Sheet2!$A$2:$A$6,0))

where “A2″ corresponds to the cell of the text string that you are trying to match. This function only works if there is only one matching cell in Sheet 2, Column A. If there are multiple instances of the text string in Sheet 2, Column A, then another function will have to be used for accurate results.

The results of the 2008 presidential election are well known, but the video below goes into detail about some of the web analytics, e-mail tracking, and landing page optimization that was used to increase conversion rates. Truly fascinating in the amount of data that was analyzed and how quickly they made adjustments to maximize conversions and increase donations.

The first 13 minutes are kind of slow and  gives a lot of political opinion from the presenter who is obviously Pro-Obama, but after that he goes into some of the Multivariate testing that they used and the results.

One surprising finding for me was that testing on their homepage found that an image converted much better than a video. I would have assumed that a video would have won by far, but after testing three variations of images, three videos, and six variations of the text on the Submit button they found that an image of the Obama family converted the best. Shows the results that testing can have.

What I also found interesting was the tools they were using were Google Analytics and Google Web Optimizer. These tools are not thought of as enterprise level tools, but they worked very well with traffic levels that were above what 98% of the sites on the web receive. The presenter left Google to work on the Obama campaign and that explains why they chose to use the Google Tools.

The video is long(over an hour), but definitely worth watching.

Google Analytics is the web analytics software for over 70% of websites which clearly makes it the market leader. When Google Analytics originally launched, it lacked much of the functionality that some of the enterprise solutions offered, but the price was hard to beat because it was free. It still remains free today, but the functionality has increased dramatically and in many ways Google Analytics is as robust as most of the other solutions available.

Google Analytics and any other web analytics software really begins to get powerful when you get past the surface level and start to dive into some of the functionality and reports that uncover nuggets of data that can have huge impacts on your user engagement and conversions.

The most comprehensive training program for Google Analytics is Conversion University. This is a self-paced training program that takes you step-by-step through Google Analytics and gives details about each of those element. I had been using Google Analytics for a few years prior to conversion university, but after sitting through the course, there are a number of elements that I am now aware of that I did not know about prior to the university.

Here are three resources that are not owned by Google, but provide great insight and techniques for getting the most out of Google Analytics.

Avinash Kaushik’s Blog (Occam’s Razor) Google Analytics Evangelist

Justin Cutroni’s Blog Google Authorized Consultants

Site Scan GA Analytics Site Scanner

I would also recommend a book by Avinash Kaushik titled “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” Which is a great resource for learning Google Analytics. The book can be kind of wordy in parts and Avinash sometimes speaks at a level too high for the topic, but a book that is definitely worth reading if you are serious about improving your ability to dive deep into Google Analytics and truly realize the power of all the functionality.

I would also recommend “Advanced Web Analytics With Google Analytics” by Brian Clifton. This is also a good read, but covers the information in a different way than Avinash. The main difference is this book is written for less techy readers who are more concerned with the metrics than the coding that got you to this point.

Web Analytics will become increasingly more important for most organizations and the better your department can derive actionable data from the web analytics solution, the further in front of your competitor you will become.