Customer Rating:  
Summary: Feed Your IT Beast!
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: On building a better website
Comment: 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.
[...]
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very useful for Google Analytics users
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not worth the time it takes to read
Comment: The writing is amateurish, the examples are elementary, the structure of presentation is not thought through, the authors don't seem to have much depth of experience. There must be better books on the subject than this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A fantastic reference for a fantastic resource for Web analytics
Comment: 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.
|
|
