Your Google® Game Plan for Success: Increasing Your Web Presence with Google AdWords, Analytics, and Website Optimizer

Chapter 7. Welcome to Google Analytics!

Part III of Your Google Game Plan for Success covers Google's web-analytics program, Google Analytics, which is a giant in its industry. The format for this part is one you're already familiar with. Just as in Part II, I'll start by walking you through the interface in this chapter (7), then talk about the industry philosophy and core essentials (8), and dive deep into the advanced features (9). In Part III there is an additional chapter of technical information (10), discussing things like tracking code, goals, Regular Expressions, profiles, and some Google Analytics "hacks."

I'll start by covering how to open a Google Analytics account and then talk about the functionality within the interface — in other words, the things that you can actually do, like segmenting and date-range comparisons. Then I'll cover each report section, starting with the overview dashboard and working my way in. As just mentioned, I'll save things like Advanced Segments and Intelligence for Chapter 9. If you purchased this book, or are standing in a bookstore reading it, because you need technical assistance, you may want to flip to Chapter 10 first before reading this chapter.

Note

As with Google AdWords, you are required to create a Google account to log in to any of the Google family of products. If you created a Google account in Chapter 2, you can use that same e-mail address and password to open up a Google Analytics account. To avoid repetition of the initial ...