Sams Teach Yourself Google Analytics in 10 Minutes

Product Author Bios

Michael Miller has written more than 100 nonfiction books over the past two decades. His best-selling titles include Sams Teach Yourself YouTube in 10 Minutes, Sams Teach Yourself Wikipedia in 10 Minutes, Windows 7 Your Way, Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource, Using Google AdWords and AdSense, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, and The Ultimate Web Marketing Guide. He has established a reputation for practical advice, technical accuracy, and an unerring empathy for the needs of his readers. For more information about Mr. Miller and his writing, visit his website at www.molehillgroup.com or email him at ga@molehillgroup.com.

Sams Teach Yourself Google Analytics™ in 10 Minutes gives you straightforward, practical answers when you need fast results. By working through its 10-minute lessons, you’ll learn everything you need to use Google Analytics to accurately measure your website’s performance–and improve it!

10 minutes is all you need to learn how to…

• Quickly create a Google Analytics account and add Google Analytics to your site
• Define goals and measure how well your site is achieving them
• Track visitors from search engines, pay-per-click advertising, email, and other sources
• Discover the pages your visitors view, how long they stay, and where they exit
• Monitor specific user actions, such as playing embedded video, selecting Flash menu items, or downloading files
• Identify your best and worst content, and fix poorly performing pages
• Improve your site by tracking error pages and broken links
• Measure AdWords traffic, position, and e-commerce performance
• Manage Google Analytics through the Dashboard
• Customize Google Analytics to work more effectively with your site
• Capture more accurate information by filtering out internal traffic
• Choose the right reports and data, understand them, and act on what you learn

Table of Contents

Introduction vi

1 A 10-Minute Guide to Web Analytics 1

2 Creating a Google Analytics Account 9

3 Adding Google Analytics to Your Website 15

4 Using the Google Analytics Dashboard 25

5 Customizing Data in the Dashboard 39

6 Tracking Visitors 51

7 Analyzing Traffic Sources 69

8 Analyzing Top Content 79

9 Tracking AdSense Performance 91

10 Viewing the Site Overlay Report 101

11 Tracking AdWords Traffic 105

12 Tracking Ecommerce 113

13 Measuring Site Search Usage 123

14 Setting Up Goals and Funnels 131

15 Using Event Tracking 139

16 Creating Custom Reports 145

17 Filtering Data 155

18 Customizing the Google Analytics Tracking Code 163

19 Creating User-Defined Visitor Types 167

20 Filtering Out Internal Traffic 171

21 Tracking Error Pages and Broken Links 179

22 Tracking File Downloads 183

23 Tracking Full Referring URLs 187

24 Identifying Poorly Performing Pages 191

25 Fixing Problem Pages with Website Optimizer 197

Index 205