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Learning Google Analytics v2

Ever since I started hosting my web site and blogs with BlueHost last year I have been wanting to improve my visibility into how my blogs and web pages are being used. AWStats is provided by my hosting service, and it includes a lot of very interesting information. Problem is, it also includes a whole lot of not so interesting information, and it can be a real chore to visually comb through the various tables and graphs that this tool uses to display all of the data that it pulls from various server and web logs to find the relevant data. The summary charts and tables are well presented, but the data must be understood properly or the viewer may be mislead. So the bottom line with AWStats is that it collects, compiles, and displays a lot of good information, but the user needs to be knowledgeable about web serving in order to interpret the AWStats reports correctly.

I wanted a fairly simple tool that would give me insight into how my blogs and web pages are being used. Who visits them, and how often. What content is viewed most often, and what search words are being used to find my content. Things like that.

I found a WordPress plugin, semmelstatz2, that I have been using to report stats for one of my WordPress blogs, but for some reason I can’t get that plugin to work on my other WordPress blog. The other issue I have with this plugin is it that it isn’t English, so I have some trouble reading the reports. Meanwhile, I had set up a Google Analytics account months ago to try to get that tool to pull data from my domains for more analytical reports, and this was working fairly well, but I didn’t have the time or knowledge to configure it to get much granular information out of it.

So when Google Analytics version 2 came out, and I saw the book pictured below on Amazon.com, I decided it was time to learn more about this tool so I could improve my stat reporting and my web site performance.

I ordered the book, and while I was waiting to receive it I installed the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin on both my blogs, and got a GA 2.0 profile set up for each of my blogs, as well as my main web page so data collection could commence. The installation of the plugin on both my blogs went smoothly (I use different themes for each blog which I suspect was why the other stat plugin didn’t work on both of them.), as did the profile setup on Google Analytics. In less than 24 hours I had data for both of my blogs and my home site all collecting to their own profile so I can view separate reports for each.

Now that I have received the book, and have a little bit of data to play around with, I can start learning some of the finer points of GA v2. I have only read the first few chapters, but I have learned much that I did not know already, including a lot of really helpful information about AWStats reports and how to interpret them. There are actually two chapters at the beginning of the book that are devoted to AWStats which helped me understand more about my AWStats reports than I had been able to figure out from the AWStats documentation. Additionally, the authors explain the differences in GA and AWStats and how the two tools can be used in tandem to get a pretty clear picture of web sites usage and activity.

I’ll share more of my experiences with GA configuration and results as I have anything of interest to share. I must say though, just looking at the first few days of data, I am completely surprised by what I am seeing.

More later.

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