Book Review: Google Analytics by Justin Cutroni

I have been using Google Analytics since December of 2005. While the base information is interesting, when they added Adsense earnings to it in 2008, that seemed to become my main focal point.

That one piece of information seems to be the primary use of Analytics for many users.

But Analytics can actually do so much more. For example, did you know that it is easy to track outgoing links and have them appear in your Analytics reports? You might have affiliate links in your pages. You will know if people actually buy, of course, but how many clicked and did not buy? Analytics can tell you that if you simply add a little bit of code to your link.

Note that you can add code if you have access to the raw HTML. Sites than only allow you to create links through their own WYSIWYG editor won't be able to do this. This book will not be as useful to you if you do not have access to the base HTML code.

Do you have pdf's or other files that people can download? Analytics can track those for you also.

How about getting Analytics to tell you when a referring site suddenly starts sending you more traffic?

These are some of the things you can get Analytics to help you with.

While most of this book does require modifications to links and sometimes addition of Javascript, that's not always required. For example, did you know about the URL Tag Builder at Google? I did not; this helps you tags links you might put in email or other places so that you can track those in Analytics also.

You don't need to use that tool. At the minimum, all you need to do is add "?utm_source=email" to your link (you can use any source, "email" is just an example).

You can do the same thing within your site. Do you wonder whether people are using your menu bar?  Simply add

"?utm_source=menubar"

to the links and they'll be in your Traffic Sources report.

Of course there are other ways to track internal links, but this certainly is easy and convenient, and being able to track visits from emails is very useful.

But do you need this book?

As noted above, for readers not controlling their own site, the methods covered here may not be possible.  But even beyond that, Google Analytics Help is very detailed and provides many examples.   Why bother with this book?

I think there are two possible answers and, oddly enough, one is for neophytes and the other is for more advanced users.   For the neophyte, a book like this may provide the structure to guide them through what is a very complex tool.  The more advanced user is going to find hints and gotchas and references to third party tools that Google would not necessarily mention.

The Blog

Even if you don't buy the book, you may want to read the author's "Analytics Talk" blog.  I just found this recently and have found it to be a great source of Analytics information.