I walked into Justin Cultroni teaching Google Conversion University and he’s fantastic as an instructor and extremely knowledgeable on analytics and Google Analytics, in particular.
I walked in to the Goals, Funnels, Ecommerence and Site Search and I got a few points cleared up I didn’t know about, including how to set up goals properly, using head matching, issues with session ids, how to set up site search and the way funnels work (a clearly defined process).
My sense is that much of the work of web analytics is to match up the way a business works with the way a particular data analytics platform needs to have the data structured. In a way, web analysts are the “glue” that ties together Marketing, IT, and the analytics collection platforms.
True, analysts provide insight into the data collected, and that is mainly the way I look at Web Analytics, but the other side of the house is that Web Analytics is the glue for matching up the different parts of your organization, in a way that is often overlooked.
I also sat in on Justin as he covered Website Optimzer, Webmaster Tools, Ad Planner, which was pretty farm good.
Google Ad Planner can be used as competitive intelligence tool much as AdCenter is.
The data comes from the behavior of the top 3000 sites, according to someone in the room that works for Google and in Google Ad Planner.
You have to sign up for the beta,you don’t have to even run a campaign with it, or you can figure out what ads to run and for whom.
Again, forgive my spelling and grammer, I am typing this on the IPhone.
