I‘ve spent more time learning Google Analytics (GA) than I care to quanitfy. I’ve asked questions that stumped the GA team and I’ve been invited to speak at Google to the GA project managers and engineers. And yet I found Brian Clifton’s new Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics to be a very informative read.

Brian writes clearly, quickly and compartmentally. You can skip over what you know and dive in anywhere that is new. Here are notes I took on features I have since availed or intend to deploy soon.

• » You can track how far visitors get when filling out a web form. Add an onBlur to each form field and each time data is added to a tagged form field GA is updated. Thus track drop-off rates as people are filling out a form. (Page 116)

• » GA has a URL building tool that makes it easy to build inbound links (such as for inbound links in a partner’s newsletter or site) that will track in GA the link source, link-type and anything else. So, instead of having to use the referrer logs to see how many people from the a partner site. You can see if they clicked the text link or the image link and if you set up filters you’ll be able to the see exactly what each user type did during their visit. Page 126)
• » It’s possible to track and transfer a user if they go to a different domain you control and thus have the knowledge it’s one unique, not two. (Page 140)
• » We can do more with filters, such as view stats for new users vs. returning users (I set this up immediately and it’s of course fascinating. Or you can filter users from certain cities, regions or countries (or a series of cities, regions or countries), or stats from people referred from Google or Stumbleupon or users of IE6 or big monitors. (Page 168)
• » You can track the keywords used in Google Image search that led to a visit to our site. Right now all we know is the raw number of visits with no insights on what they were searching for. (page 181)
• » It’s possible to label visitors for their sessions and see stats on what they do. An example could be tracking someone that participated in an advertisers landing page or contest or people that arrived from a search engine, partner site. Anything. You simply assign them a distinct user-cource keyword and then filter all those users. (Page 183)
• » Track our brand awareness by charting how many searches are done using your brand name. If you did a big PR campaing you can track success by an increase in searches done on your brand name. (page 244)
• » You can start assigning values to certain terms (Per Search Value) that are searched on in our internal site search to track overtime which terms mean the most to you, even if they are not searched on the most. You can also isolate visits that used search vs. those that don’t to see how important it might be to get people to use our site search tool (or how much money we should spend improving it) (Page 289-291)
• » In the Visitors Tab in Visits, there is an ‘hourly’ view I did not know about. (Page 59)
• » GA can easily be used to store details of an e-com transaction. Order Id, Total $ Transaction, Affiliate, state, zip, country, shipping type and any other standard field that would be of interest to track. Do this by simply passing custom values to the GA javascript tracking code. (Page 117)