I’ve been using AdWords since 2001, just a few weeks after the UK launch and in that time I’ve seen the product expand greatly from it’s humble beginnings into an environment where lack of knowledge costs users greatly, It’s no longer the place to add 2000 keywords to an adgroup with one generic advert and leave it a week to see how it does, users need useful data and they need it quickly to ascertain what is working, what isn’t, and why so with that in mind Google bought existing technology, developed it further and launched Google Analytics in 2005.

Google Analytics has also evolved (and continues to do so!) greatly over the years and despite using it daily we figured it was time to brush up on the latest and greatest/best practices so we (myself and Faaiz, our head of search) booked a place on the Google Analytics Seminar held in Amsterdam on the second and third of March.

The seminar was a two day event, first day being simple and the second day ninja level advanced!, the first day covered the very basics from the interface layout to figuring out where visitors came from, paid or organic, site search then goals and funnels, all pretty basic stuff but around 250 PowerPoint screens to crunch through so it was brisk but well covered.

The first positive for me was Justin from Epik One (epikone.com), I’ve sat through a lot of training sessions over the years and I have to say most have been pretty bland, some have been bearable, others I even stayed awake during but Justin is a top notch presenter, he actually manages to make analytics interesting and engages the audience fantastically, he even managed to make American jokes funny in Holland so that’s no small feat and a good example of his skills.

Secondly there were not one but two Google guys in attendance which added further weight to the esteem that Justin and EpikOne are held in, they added they voice on some of the wider questions and some of the more advanced/unique ones too, that’s not to say Justin’s knowledge wasn’t on a Jedi level, but some questions were very specific and orientated to a unique set of circumstances and just as with anything to do with Google there is some ambiguity between what should be and what actually is so they were able to nod or shake their head and confirm/deny/explain some questions that Justin would have to have followed up on at a later date had they not been there.

The second day was more advanced, much more advanced! there were around 225 PowerPoint screens to sit through but once again Justin made every single one of them interesting and educational, the content was heavier for sure but still easily absorbed as Justin explained it until everyone understood it even if he had to cover it a few different ways until it sank in.

There are a lot of custom filters you can create in analytics to drill down your data into tailored usable reports and I’m guessing that only a very small percentage of users actually even know this is possible let alone do anything about it so I would suggest you take a closer look at analytics regardless of if you are an affiliate or merchant as you really could save a lot of money by making use of some of the more advanced features in there.

I can’t emphasise enough (especially in the current climate where every pound/dollar really does count) the need to crunch analytics data and use it to identify areas such as excessive cost, low conversion, actual keywords driving traffic (custom filter) rather than those being bid on (analytics default information) so you can target them further, but it all starts with getting analytics set up correctly, especially so if you have a checkout on site as you need to be recording actual basket data etc.

Being aware of how hard it can be for those who simply don’t understand it all (most people on day one of the seminar worked for big companies and had no clue what it was about before attending yet were in charge of as many as 150 websites!) we are offering help with integration of the analytics at very reasonable rates, so if you aren’t sure if it’s installed or recording correctly or would like some custom filtering set up then get in touch via the contact details/form here and we’ll check it and give you price for integration including any custom coding for basket checkout integration and custom reporting views you’d like creating.

If you are fancing a tinker yourself then I can recommend the seminar, you can find out more here although it means hopping on a plane if you aren’t in the states, but it’s well worth it!