Google Analytics 2.0 - Book review

Google Analytics 2.0 by Jerri L. Ledford , Mary E. Tyler

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 think most people would agree that statistics are important. That and its just fun to see the number of visitors, especially when they are increasing. But beyond the number of visitors, I didn’t care about much else. 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 it had or what was really important to track or even how to use its more advance features.
What is in the book

This book pretty much covers anything you need to know about google analytics. It goes into the different ways you can track how a visitor visits your website, the pages they click through in order to get somewhere, and how to track if visitors are reaching your goal or not. Your goal being different depending on what type of website you run. The book goes over how to track these different goals for ecommerce websites and content websites. By using these different tracking methods, you will be able to understand how to improve your website.

For example if you are running a content website where you want the visitors to spend as much time as possible on your website then by knowing all this information google analytics gives you. You will be able to understand how a person navigates the website, what they are likely to click on, what interests them, and what makes them stay or what makes them leave. Then you can take that information and change the website’s navigation to better suit your visitor’s needs and provide content they like more.
Conclusion

The only problem I have with this book is that the last few chapters are pretty much fluff as they are redundant, but useful as a quick reference I suppose. The only other thing is that I couldn’t find how to track how many times people downloaded something. I found out by using the help section in google analytics though. Here is the link if you want to track downloads.

Other than that, this book would be helpful to anyone who wants to understand how their website is being used on a deeper level and if the changes they made to their website have the impact they wish. I highly recommend this book, great to have on the shelf until you master google analytics. I will try to review a book that will help improve both of our repertoire of skills once a week around this time.