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Google Analytics

TownieDeac

words are futile devices
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Yo,

SO I peeped the HTML structuring of the page, and couldn't help but notice the google analytics bot (as well as some cool CSS stuff).

Anybody actively monitoring the account, or do y'all use something from vBulletin to monitor the site usage more often?

I love Google Analytics and a lot of Google's developer suite, and I'd love to talk to a site admin or any other users who have some experience with it to talk shop a bit.
 
I have the Google Analytics set up, but I don't really mess with it too much anymore.
 
Another reason I ask is because I'm looking at their sampling methodology. I see the slider where you can adjust for more precision vs faster load time, but I'm still only able to get about 85% sample as opposed to the unsampled, full results.

Do any of you know enough about Google's sampling methodology to know whether it's worthwhile to upgrade to the premium account to get unsampled results? We have several web properties that receive over 1 mil views/month.
 
Why do you say that, IAI?

Just had a webinar with WebTrends today at noon about their new reporting stuff, and using analytics for SEO/SEM and usability and design and all that jazz.

WebTrends is pretty sweet. Heat maps and real time user tracking are incredible.

I do like the UI at GA though, and their dashboard integration feature is really useful and simple.
 
I don't know much about it Townie. I just use it to make sure this place doesn't go up in smoke. Speaking of which. I'm very happy with our hosting provider. Great decision on our post.
 
For the purposes of this place, you probably don't need it really. You have a "who's online now" and page views and stuff built in already anyway, and I'm sure your host provides you with other traffic info you might want.

On the Google Analytics Premium side of things...definitely not worth the upgrade to get an account manager, more custom reports, faster load time, and unsampled results...because it freaking costs $150k/yr. That's significantly more than our hosting, and we have some huge properties.
 
For the purposes of this place, you probably don't need it really. You have a "who's online now" and page views and stuff built in already anyway, and I'm sure your host provides you with other traffic info you might want.

On the Google Analytics Premium side of things...definitely not worth the upgrade to get an account manager, more custom reports, faster load time, and unsampled results...because it freaking costs $150k/yr. That's significantly more than our hosting, and we have some huge properties.

Actually, our old hosts were much better from an analytics standpoint. We don't get much from our current one. The standard GA is great for spot checking traffic and trends.
 
For the purposes of this place, you probably don't need it really. You have a "who's online now" and page views and stuff built in already anyway, and I'm sure your host provides you with other traffic info you might want.

On the Google Analytics Premium side of things...definitely not worth the upgrade to get an account manager, more custom reports, faster load time, and unsampled results...because it freaking costs $150k/yr. That's significantly more than our hosting, and we have some huge properties.

If you really want a more indepth hands on solution - WebTrends or Woopra are pretty decent. You get more access and more in depth reports and someone to talk to when shit doesn't make sense.

When Google bought Urchin, they sort of killed the market on analytics programs. GA has tons of capabilities, it is just not always intuitive as to how to get to them. I didn't think they were looking for $12k a month anymore to get a google support person, pretty sure it dropped pretty substantially - but could be wrong.
 
We might be able to get a custom quote for our place, but their page says $150k annual fee.

I think we may look to WebTrends going forward.
 
Just started getting into Google Analytics as part of the new job. Not sure what we as a company pay for it, and we luckily have a PPC guy who can tell me what I'm suppose to be looking at, but I find it pretty interesting.
 
We are putting out an RFP for a new reporting vendor. Nothing against Google Analytics except that their basic services don't come with an account manager or much support at all, and premium, which takes away sampling, is too $$$.

WebTrends really impressed me, but I'm looking forward to seeing what else is out there.
 
Some of the updates to Google Analytics are cray. In-market segments, age, gender, etc. For a site like ours with a hard to find privacy policy, we are going to have to think long and hard about whether or not to implement these, and how/to what extent, we notify our users.
 
Well you can't extrapolate too much, because you're still gonna get a large subset of "not set" values, accounting for like 35-40% of visits, so you never really know how representative your total sample is.

I can see the in-market segments like affinity tracking and stuff being of huge e-commerce value to big commercial sites.

To a site like ours, we are more interested in demographics like age that will tell us what stage of career our user is most likely in, and the truly MONTE stuff comes with using demographics and interests to set up A/B tests , something we will likely employ when working on our redesign.

Also, the new tag manager with auto event tracking is solid. We can track our campaigns now without our web vendor's help changing the code around and what not.
 
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