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October 25, 2006

A little over a month ago, I pointed out that a new Google Analytics paperback had hit the streets. I had just ordered my copy from Amazon and promised to post my review of it as soon as I finished reading it.

Released in early September, the book makes the following promises on its back cover:

* Get familiar with the concept of analytics, what Google Analytics offers, and how it compares to popular site statistics programs.
* Learn to set up the program, navigate the interface, understand filters, and use goal-setting features.
* Integrate Google Analytics with Google AdWords.
* Make the most of reporting dashboards.
* Find out how to use analytics for marketing and content optimization.
* Understand what each type of report means and how to interpret it.
* Explore how other companies have used analytics to improve site performance.
* Investigate how to use Google Analytics for complete e-commerce analysis.

Here's my opinion on how it delivers:

The book is written in a style that makes it accessible for beginners, and delivers on its promise to help newbies learn some basic concepts about web analytics, the data that is available in Google Analytics, and how it compares to AW Stats (an open source log analyzer). This section is about 40 pages long.

The book devotes about 60 light pages of coverage on setting up Google Analytics on a basic site (does not cover e-commerce or advanced site setup).

In the third major section of the book, about 200 pages are devoted to how to interpret the reports contained within Google Analytics. Most of the 200 pages contained screen shots and text you'd find in the help section of Google Analytics itself.

There were several mentions of a blog by the authors on Google Analytics, but no mention of the URL. When I went to the author's site, there were no links to a Google Analytics blog by the authors. Oh well, you're certainly in the right place if you're looking for a Google Analytics blog here.

On page 247 the author states: "Google Analytics isn't designed to track PayPal accounts: it's designed to track the sales on your site, using e-commerce systems that work through your site."

Although I agree that Google Analytics wasn't designed to track PayPal accounts, we have easily used Google Analytics to track conversions occurring through PayPal and in my opinion, one of the greatest strengths of Google Analytics is its ability to track ecommerce transactions occurring on a third-party ecommerce engine where the website owner has the ability to tag HTML pages or can access an API (as in the PayPal example).

While we're on the subject of e-commerce, the other obvious shortcoming is that there is no information about how to track e-commerce transactions (relative to using the hidden form on the receipt page to pass final ecommerce data to the analytics reporting database).

In conclusion, if you're technical and looking for a book to cover Google Analytics installation from head to toe, you'll probably want to skip this book; if you've got a simple website and need a primer in the basics, this is your Google Analytics go-to guide.

Interested in learning more about Google Analytics?
Attend our LIVE Google Analytics Seminars for Success training in Atlanta, GA Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 and Thursday, April 15th, 2010 or get the latest tips and tricks sent to you via our free, twice-monthly Google Analytics newsletter.

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