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

Chapter 16. Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer

The final chapter in Part V of Your Google Game Plan for Success will discuss the merging of Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer (GWO). These two programs naturally go together — so much so that Google has released code-compatibility fixes for users running experiments with Google Website Optimizer and tracking website traffic with Google Analytics.

The two foci of this chapter are ensuring that your Google Website Optimizer Tracking Code isn't interfering with your Google Analytics Tracking Code, and interpreting report data in Google Analytics to augment your experiment data from Google Website Optimizer. As you learned in Chapter 11, Google Website Optimizer provides a limited (but powerful) amount of data. You know only how many people visited the experiment page(s) and how many of those visitors converted. With Google Analytics you'll be able to add powerful layers of data on top of what you already know from Google Website Optimizer.

Before you can start analyzing your data, you need to ensure that your tracking codes are working together, and not interfering with each other. First, let's review the tracking code compatibility.

Tracking Code Compatibility

As I mentioned in Chapter 13, you'll need to ensure that your Google Website Optimizer code is not interfering with your Google Analytics code. In the early days of Google Website Optimizer the pageTracker function was a part of the code snippet, which caused ...