This Wednesday, November 24th, we’ll be hosting a free, live, online course all about using goals in Google Analytics. Goals are a way to measure conversions or successful actions on your website. This action could be a view of a specific page such as a 'thank you' page after a visitor has completed a form or made a purchase on your site.

In this live course you’ll learn how to set up goals and how they can be of benefit for you. We'll also clarify the difference between AdWords conversions and Google Analytics goal conversions. Finally, we'll discuss what reports the goals section offers and how these reports can help you make informed business decisions, particularly in relation to monitoring the performance of your AdWords ads.

This interactive course will be delivered by two members of the Google Analytics team and will take approximately 1 hour including time for Q&A. It will take place on Wednesday 24th November from 3pm - 4pm GMT and is suitable for anyone who’d like to learn more about goals in Google Analytics.

If you're interested make sure to sign up now!

Posted by Sara Fogarty, Google Analytics team.

Do you need answers to your Google Analytics questions? Do you want advice on customizing the tracking code? Eager to share your knowledge with other Google Analytics users?

The Google Analytics Help Forum is a community of people like you, who enjoy helping each other figure out the best ways to use Google Analytics. You can share your expertise or seek out answers in this user powered community. Also, there are active Googlers such as myself who are monitoring the forum and chiming in as often as we can. It's probably the quickest way to get help - usually you don't have to wait 24 hours for a response.

Our Top Contributors are highly knowledgeable and will point you to the right resources that'll help you troubleshoot your issue. We love giving them a shout out here - maybe next month it'll be you or someone who helped you.

Top Contributors for October

• PPC_Guru (Phil Pearce)
• Bronwyn Vourtis (Whims)

Thanks you two! Maybe we'll send you a little fun Google Analytics swag (or already have :-). And to everyone else writing responses and jumping in and helping out - thanks. And to those posting questions - thanks as well. It helps us figure out what's puzzling our users, or causing problems, so we can improve the product. This community never ceases to amaze us - you have driven improvements and refinements that make this product great. We're listening and evolving.

So, why wait when you have a question or a tip about GA? If you can't find the answer in our other resources such as the do-it-yourself resources under "Learning Center" over on the right hand side of this page, then go social and post them here in the forum.


Posted by Arunodaya Jayanti, Google Analytics Team

For Conversion Blog readers who manage Analytics and AdWords on behalf of their clients, there is a new and interesting resource available, starting today; this resource, the AdWords Agency Help Center, is specifically designed to help agencies master the suite of Google media solutions and account management tasks across many accounts.

The Agency Help Center is currently available for the US and UK. Over the course of Q4 2010, we'll be localizing this resource across multiple languages, as well as continuing to incorporate new agency-centric resources into the site.


Posted by: Sara Bonfioli, Google Analytics Team

This weeks’ featured app on the Analytics App Gallery is the BAM Analytics Pro app for the iPhone. If you have ever needed to reference your site metrics in a meeting or situation where it wasn’t appropriate to fire up the laptop and open up your account, then you may find a Google Analytics smart phone app valuable.

This app, developed by Blast Advanced Media (one of our Certified Partners), uses the Google Analytics API to quickly and securely access all of your reports, apply your Advanced Segments, and even create Custom Reports right within the app. You can view common preset date ranges, set a custom date range, or compare to a previous date range for additional context. All the functionality you could need within a clean, user-friendly interface. Here's a sample of custom reports functionality:

BAM Analytics Pro can be purchased here on the iTunes app store for $1.99. Our Google Analytics Certified Partners are some of the most inventive users and developers of our free API. Many of their business-driven tools and applications make it to our Analytics App Gallery, where you can find a variety of solutions that compliment and enhance our product.

Great work BAM!

Posted by Jesse Nichols, Google Analytics Team

On 2 November, Google Analytics experienced technical difficulties which lasted for a few hours. Users saw lower visits than expected during this time.

We deployed a fix as as soon as we were alerted and Analytics is now back to normal and data has been restored.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics team

We’re excited to introduce a new series of YouTube videos we're calling "Web Analytics TV" starring Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski from the Google Analytics team. These videos are a fun and interactive source of information around anything Analytics related.You can ask questions, and vote for your favourite questions from other viewers, via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and then have our experts answer them in the next installment.

Check out the latest episode below, and visit the Google Analytics YouTube Channel to see all previous episodes.



In this episode we introduce our new ninja award program (and ninja chop to go with it). Going forward, we will pick our favourite question and award the person the Analysis Ninja of the Episode award! They will get an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.

Our first winner is Sushant from New York for his excellent question on tabbed browsing and it’s impact on session level data. Congrats and please keep the great questions coming (and win!).

Here is the list of last weeks questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:
(2:35) Combining (A AND B) OR (C AND D) in advanced segments
(4:03) Is there a way to tell how many people have opted out of being tracked by GA
(6:18) How does tracking Google Analytics and Urchin work together
(7:53) How is tabbed browsing tracked in Google Analytics?
(10:30) Do Website Optimizer A/B tests only track direct traffic?
(11:27) Are there any survey/voice of customer tools that integrate with GA?
(12:47) Does the async code execute faster than the traditional snippet?
(14:40) You can’t track users who have opted out of GA
(15:13) Why table report filters get removed when you navigate away from a page
(16:30) Why are there differences between Unique visitor reports? Which to use.
(18:00) Can Google Analytics track live chat forms?


Here are the links to the topics we discuss:
How you can automate requesting multiple advanced segments with the API to get AND precedence with Advanced Segments.
Kampyle - Google Analytics, Voice of Customer Integration
Live Person - Google Analytics, Integration

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, share your comments below. And, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team