15 Reasons Why You Should Take the Certified Web Analyst Test

As of August 2, 2010, the Web Analytics Association (WAA) has launched it’s formal Web Analyst Certification Program™. It is a voluntary certification program that is offered worldwide at 60 testing centers. The purpose of the program is to provide a mechanism for individuals to obtain professional recognition after demonstrating their knowledge of and competency within the web analytics industry. Certification will be issued to each qualified person upon meeting WAA’s required education, experience, and examination requirements.

I am a huge fan of the certification test and just registered myself. I am waiting for confirmation back to when my test date will be (I’m hoping in September).

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My 10 Business Intelligence Notes to Document With Google Annotations New Feature

Last Wednesday, I attended a Google Analytics webinar and I had a sneak peek of a lot of cool features.

My favorite new feature was the Annotations. It allows you to link your personal notes to the main time-line on your Google Analytics profile graphs. These Annotations are attributed to your login and can be viewed by others who have access to the same profile or you can choose to mark notes as private and only you see the notes.
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Twitter May Bring More Site Traffic and Conversions Than You Know

You should be able to see traffic to your website from Twitter as a “referral” in your analytics software. That is, if you are spending a fair amount of time interacting on Twitter, helping others, tweeting your blog posts/service offerings and actually have the your website url in your profile. This data of “website referrals” is good, but doesn’t really tell you (the site owner) insightful metrics for twitter.

Also, interesting is that the leading analytics software (aka Google) data may only track 50% of the Twitter traffic you are actually receiving.

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How to Tag and Track Banner Ads in Google Analytics

Google Analytics does a great job of tracking where your site traffic comes from (also known as “referral sites”), but it doesn’t automatically drill down to what link or graphic it came from on a given page. This is particularly true if you have multiple links pointing to your site from one referral site page. Google Analytics lumps them together unless you do some advanced tagging.

What is advanced tagging in Google Analytics?
Google allows you to append tags to URLs that get picked up in your Google Analytics as a campaign, so you can see the results of traffic that each link brings into your site. I find this quite handy when trying to understand what elements on a site are actually bringing in traffic and, more importantly, what ads bring conversions (sign ups or sales). I can later use this tracking intellect to determine which ad campaigns to keep running.

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