Avinash Kaushik asked me for a list of free tools I like a couple of months back for a blog post on Occam's Razor and I pretty much gave him the list I published at Big Green Blog recently. 

The post went live tonight and I read it - it's FANTASTIC - and I'm enjoying reading how Avanish uses those tools.  I use all those tools often - Avanish did a better job explaining the Microsoft AdLab tools for Demographic Prediction could be used than I have.

I'm glad Avanish is writing a book on Web Analytics - it's going to be quite entertaining - I hope he puts some of this stuff in the new book.  The point of his post on Five Free “Advanced” Web Analytics Examples: Look Outside, Think Different. which I'm sure is going to get DIGGED - use other tools (free one's in this case) beyond your site analytics to gather insight.

One thing I'd add to Kaushik's description of Google AdWords Keyword Expansion, near the end of the post - I use the somewhat differently.  Google's Keyword Research tool is one of the best semantic analysis extraction tools and it's free.  Put in a URL and the tool will tell you what it thinks the page or site is about - it will also give you the other data Avinash talks about in the post.

Often, I've used the keyword data from this tool in Competitive Analysis - comparing the keyword phrases of sites that are competing to find a common set of keywords that I can run a ranking report against - and thereby decide which competitor is doing better for those keywords.

It's a great post , I think it's one of his best, and I'm glad Avinash got around to posting it now.