I like your idea of integrating educational materials into the application. Or, even better, would be to build actionability logic into GA.

Beverly: Glad you had a good time at Boot Camp. It’s always fun to interact with other folks that are interested analytics and marketing.

I really am trying to embrace GA as a reporting tool. You can create a scheduled email in GA that contains multiple PDF reports. Then you can add some analysis to an email and attach the PDFs.

This is a break from more traditional reporting, but hopefully the recipients see the value in the analysis and recomendations and not seeing lots of tables of data.

Thanks to both of you for taking the time to share your thoughts.

I am looking for a method to compile summaries from relevant data instead of just handing over individual key reports. What would you recommend?

Thanks – oh and Boot Camp was a great experience!

On the other side is the implication made in much of the basic information even on Google’s own sites that “all you have to do is paste this code in your footer template and you’re done.”

On many dynamic sites a raw profile like that will produce reports which cannot even be read, let alone used as the basis of analysis.

That’s where sites like this and books like yours come in of course. And of course there are the consultants and experts of various types.

But I think something is missing. There’s a huge amount of support material available in text and video form from Google themselves and sites like these. Somehow or other I think Google need to incorporate some form of guidance towards that within the system itself.

I noticed at the London Emetrics how someone from Google consciously did not use the word ‘free’, but referred to there being no charge for use. In the same way, I think people need to stop pretending that it’s ‘easy’. It’s much, much more friendly than most rivals, but none of these things are easy at first.

I may have techn-nor-ized my key point! What I was trying to say, was that Google is trying to facilitate analysis for everyone, including site owners. GA is no good to the world if no one can make change based on the data and that’s Google’s ultimate goal: make every site owner embrace data driven site improvement. Then it’s just a short jump to world domination…. analysts that

Jonathan: While it seems like a while since Google has added any features to GA, there has been a relatively steady stream of small enhancements. Things like multi-line graphing, audio reports, TV reports, benchmark reports and event tracking have all been added since Oct 2007. OK, so event tracking is still in beta. But not bad.

More importantly, Google has upgraded the JS tracking code and much of the back end. GA now has a solid foundation for growth.

Zvika: I couldn’t agree more. The more time I spend looking at data the more I want to dig down and find actionable nuggets.

Thanks for reading everyone.

Google’s advertising strength depends on people having easy access to constantly improving tools – it’d be great if they put more resources into GA.

I think this is the key point Justin. And if you gave such a line to *most* web site owners they’d suspect you of talking techno gibberish at them. They’d be right. :-)

GA is a tool for Web Analysts. It is NOT a tool for site owners.

So this is where I would depart from your premise. GA is free, sure. But in and of itself that alone won’t help people make better web sites – which is IMHO the true goal of any WA tool.
GA can be and is so much more. But to most people, as you point out, it’s just a prettier way of counting hits. Sadly, that’s how GA presents itself too.

My 2c…

Cheers!
- Steve