I recently wrote A Revolution for Tracking with Google Analytics to share with you a few advanced tools developed for Google Analytics.  Here's the ultimate source for Google Analytics Hacks, Plugins, Tips and Tools.



The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection - A list of 24 Hacks and plugins from Bryan Eisenberg:

"Google Analytics provides some great information about what is happening on your website. But what if you want to take it to the next level? Thanks to the many smart people who have created these wonderful hacks and plugins to get you some powerful additions to Google Analytics. Please note most of these need the truly awesome GreaseMonkey FireFox extension."

GA Hacks from Advanced Web Metrics
    Tracking social networks with Google Analytics using filters

    Tracking regional Search Engines in Google Analytics
    Updated auto tracking script for file downloads, outbound links and mailto links
    Tracking error pages from Wordpress
    Tracking links to direct downloads - Automatically

8 Awesome Google Analytics Hacks, Tips and Tricks from SearchLight Digital -  The last post you'll ever need on Google Analytics, covering ecommerce, advanced PPC keyword tracking, cross-domain analytics and more!

Enjoy!

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I was lucky enough to get one of the original Google Analytics accounts right after it was released in November 2005, just before they put a halt to the open enrollment and went to a invitation-code system. Since then, Google Analytics has definitely improved with features such as new tracking to improve over the old urchin.js, a new interface, the release of comparison reports, and even benchmarking.

Even so, there are many features that still are just a little off the mark.

Enter ROI Revolution. I've never met or worked with these guys, and am not affiliated in any way. But I can say that after reading their Unofficial Google Analytics Blog and implementing some of their Google Analytics tactics, they know what they are doing.

I suggest you click on over there and spend some time reading.  What will you get?  Advanced Google Analytics training.  That's right, figure out how to track, report, filter, or whatever else to whatever using Google Analytics. Here are a few of my top pics on their blog:

Exact Keyword Tracking with ga.js - A must have for pay-per-click marketers out there!  In the "Keywords" report for cpc medium traffic, Google Analytics doesn't report the exact search term queries.  This presents a HUGE problem if you phrase or broad match.  Read this post to find out how to generate a user-defined report of the exact queries your visitors are typing in.

Installing Website Optimizer if you use Google Analytics - If you use Website Optimizer, here's the quick and easy way to marry it with Google Analytics for the best results.

Excluding Internal Traffic the Easy Way - I visit my own websites failry often to use the CMS or administration backends, and useful tools on the public side.  A few sites I've worked on have dozens of employees who so this also.  So how can we make sure this internal traffic doesn't skew our analytics reporting?  The handy-dandy internal traffic filter.

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I just watched two videos by Rand Fishkin regarding Google's PageRank, and I think that these are easily the most succinct education about Google's Pagerank that I have seen in quite a while.

The first video, What's PageRank Got to do With It?, describes how Google uses PageRank for:
1. Crawling - How Google's spider determins what to crawl.
2. Inclusion - Divided into 2 pieces, importance and uniqueness
3. Freshness - How often content is updated, and therefore how often to re-crawl a page.
4. Ranking - how pages in Google's index are ranked.

IMO, the important comment to draw from Rand's video is that #4, Ranking, may be the least important function of PageRank, especially when anchor text, link quality, link source, etc are becoming less important or trustworth.

After the helpful education session, we can move on to Rand's next post, Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II.  Here's the information that you will find really useful, because Rand goes into how PageRank can help you optimize your site better.  So, rather than trying to translate the video, watch it for yourself:


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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I taken on some new SEO efforts for three websites, and have two other sites that were built specifically for SEO within the last few months that I will begin working on soon.  Getting Google Sitelinks for each of these sites has always been a line item on my goal list.

Let me apply a disclaimer here: Although Sitelinks are on my SEO tasklist, Sitelinks do not affect your rankings in the search engines.  I am including it with my SEO efforts due to an assumption based on these givens:
1. Sitelinks are generated according to a Google algorithm when your site is spidered.
2. Google evaluates websites according to their perceived relevance to consumers.
3. SEO is all about showing the spiders how your site is relevant, and what keywords it is relevant for.

 So IMO, it's only natural to assume that a well SEO'd site has an increased chance of being rewarded with Google Sitelinks. That aside, I wanted them for the added access, usability and convenience for web visitors, and because Sitelinks make your listing stand out from all of the other results on the SERP.

So when I came in the office this past Tuesday and saw that Google had generated Sitelinks for one of my domains, I was thrilled... and perplexed  The site that is the newest domain and least optimized website for SEO within this current effort.  And the question that came to mind is this: Why does the Google algorithm to apply Sitelinks to some domains and not to others?

Cristian Mezei has compiled an excellent list of potential Google Sitelink triggers at SEOPedia.org about his testing methods and hypothesis on what does and does not affect Google Sitelinks for a domain.  Google only provides a bare bones description at How can I see links to my site?  (I can't imagine anyone answering "yes" to the 'was this information helpful' question.) 

Overall, there's little out there other than theories about Google Sitelinks.  But there's a little hope.  In a blog posting called Information about Sitelinks, Google says

Our process for generating Sitelinks is completely automated. We show them when we think they'll be most useful to searchers, saving them time from hunting through web pages to find the information they are looking for. Over time, we may look for ways to incorporate input from webmasters too.

IMO, it's time.

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