The end of the year is a nice time to take a look back over all that was accomplished throughout the year. To that end, I’m going to give you a list of our top 8 Analytics Blog Posts of 2009. As we go through the list, I’ll give you a short description of each post as well as any random thoughts I have about the post.
Enjoy the posts and have a Happy New Year!
#1. 6 Tools Every GA User Should Have
Shawn Purtell
Random Thoughts:
This was by far the most popular post of 2009. It did so well that I decided to steal its format in hope of boosting the popularity of this post. It now includes 7 tools instead of 6 for added tool enjoyment. Looking over this list, even though this post was written back in January of ’09, most of these tools are still very useful enhancements of the Google Analytics Interface and have even been updated since the writing of the post. GANotes, on the other hand, has achieved what every Google Analytics Tool dreams of becoming one day: it is now a Google Analytics fully-fledged feature known as Annotations.
#2. Tracking Transactions back to Initial Referrer
Jeremy Aube
Random Thoughts:
What’s up with that frog? Apparently the idea is that considering the size of that frog, this is probably the first time it’s been touched by human hands, i.e. first touch. There’s a lot of talk about first-touch attribution vs. last-touch attribution. This post explains a way to get both in Google Analytics.
#3. Five Google Analytics FAILS
Michael Harrison
Random Thoughts:
We’ve seen people do a lot of crazy Google Analytics setups. Unfortunately, many of these fails are all too common. This post is worth reading just for the laughs alone (well, OK, it’s GA humor, but it’s still pretty funny), but it also serves as a much needed warning sign. Most of these fails resulted in permanent damage of one sort or another to Google Analytics data.
#4 ga.js code for GWO
Jeremy Aube
Random Thoughts:
Yet another update to GARE. This particular update was nice because allowed you to get the appropriate modifications for subdomain and multiple domain tracking. I’m not sure if this particular GARE feature still works (Update 12/30/2009: just fixed this. It should work fine now.); Google updated the Google Website Optimizer Interface so that ga.js code is provided by default.
#5. 5 Advanced Segments for Ecommerce
Michael Harrison
Random Thoughts:
Another list post, this one dealing with using the fairly-new, enterprise-level feature, advanced segments, to uncover more than ever before about your ecommerce data. My particular favorite advanced segment is #2. It used to be very difficult to determine the influence of a landing page on your site, but advanced segments makes this easy (and maybe even fun!).
#6. 6 Tools to Troubleshoot GA
Shawn Purtell
Random:
For some reason, I’m reminded of a quote: “So far alls I’ve come up with is the effects of gasoline. {pauses a bit} On fire.” There are a lot of things on fire in this post too. We use most of these tools every day. Personally, my life would be pretty much over if I didn’t have FireBug.
#7. Stressing About Ecommerce Variables?
Caitlin Cook
Random Thoughts:
Yes, those ecommerce functions sure do ask a lot of you. Fortunately you don’t have to give into their demands. This post tells you exactly which variables you need to make Google Analytics ecommerce tracking work for you.
#8. Viewing A/B Experiments in Google Analytics
Shawn Purtell
Random Thoughts:
Getting Google Website Optimizer data for multi-variate tests into Google Analytics takes a little bit of work. For A/B tests, this data is available by default in Google Analytics since each combination in your test is a separate page. This post tells you how to further unlock your A/B test data in Google Analytics using advanced segments. It also has a really nice screenshot of GARE in action.
