These are [...]]]> Following is the link to Google Analytics LAB which has some useful applications and plugins to enhance the usage of Analytics data. You can find  plugins to Microsoft Excel to generate nicer reports as well as applications that allows you to embed Google Analytics reports into your web pages for the world to see.

These are not Google apps and Google makes no promises or representations about their performance, quality, or content, but some of them look useful

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataGallery.html

/Hossein

“We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at [...]]]> Google Analytics product manager Amy Chang explains that Google has been exploring the best method for making this happen, and details the solution:

“We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality.”

According to Chang, the plugin will be available to the public in the “coming weeks“.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-choice-for-users-browser-based-opt.html

Do you think it will effect GA or users who will know about the plugin and actually install it is probably minimal and the effect is not going to be significant?

/Hossein

But I was thinking about using GA to achieve this (at least partially)!  As most of you know we can add parameters to our URL to track referral websites.

I guess [...]]]> I was reading articles about monitoring your social media network using applications like viralheat (see   Monitor and Measure Your Social Media Campaigns which I posted recently).

But I was thinking about using GA to achieve this (at least partially)!  As most of you know we can add parameters to our URL to track referral websites.

I guess you are familiar with following tagging parameters that being used for adwords and keep track of your ad campaigns (Herman talked about it in CMIS 530 : Web Analytics for Internet Business). So why not use them?

Only thing you need to be careful and remember  is: The first 3 parameters (source, medium and campaign) are required and last two (content and term) are optional so in order to have a successful tagging you need to add at least the first 3 parameters to your URL

1- utm_source
2- utm_medium
3- utm_campaign
4- utm_content
5- utm_term

As you see in following examples you can track everything  your blog, twitter account, facebook  or YouTube, just add above tags to your URL and post it!

Example:

http://mysite.com?utm_source=webAnalyticsBlog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=DownloadWhitePaper

http://mysite.com?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SweepStakeSubmitIdea

In adwords world (GA) content is your ad content and term is the keyword that you are running a campaign for it, but in this context they can be used to help you to get more useful data from your social media campaign.

/Hossein

Also it makes it easier to us (consultants and web analytics  practitioners) to convince customers to use Goggle tools and take advantage of all free services that they are connected to each other and can help anyone [...]]]> This is a good news, specially for companies and big firms to have a bit of peace of mind.

Also it makes it easier to us (consultants and web analytics  practitioners) to convince customers to use Goggle tools and take advantage of all free services that they are connected to each other and can help anyone to improve their website and online presence.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/02/powerful-flexible-secure-and-now.html

/Hossein

These tools are specifically made to monitor your social network campaigns by giving you useful reports. I [...]]]> I believe these days with all these new mediums to communicate like social media networks, it is not enough to monitor just your website by setting up an analytics account. You need to monitor your other mediums and campaigns.

These tools are specifically made to monitor your social network campaigns by giving you useful reports. I was listening to Avinash talking about his new book (web analytics 2.0)  and its difference with the first one (Web Analytics an Hour a Day), one of the main difference he was mentioning having new chapters that are talking about social media monitoring and the importance of it.

Viralheat is providing one of these tools that is available for social media monitoring and they just announced integrating Goggle Buzz to it

Viralheat’s Google Buzz monitoring:

- filters and sorts posts/comments on Google Buzz by keywords

- tabulates traffic with Twitter, Facebook, blogs, viral video sites and now all the mentions on Google Buzz

- gathers sentiment analysis on Google Buzz posts

- views top authors by volume to identify people that are talking the most about a keyword in Google Buzz

- views total number of unique authors on Google Buzz for a keyword

- offers Google Buzz stats and mentions via platform APIs

/Hossein