I will shortly be testing Radian6 and Google Analytics integrations on WebMetricGuru.com (I’m happy to say my Radian6 Influencer Account was restored and I’m grateful to  Community Manager Cory Hartlen at Radian6 for getting me up and running).

As I understand it, Web Analytics integrations are in place for WebTrends On Demand (only), Adobe Omniture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics.    The instructions for Google Analytics are fairly straightforward and involved creating an  account linked to the Google Analytics Profile for a specific Radian6 email account.  Where an account has many profiles this procedure allows only one Google Analytics profile to be tied to a specific topic profile.

In my case, I simply created a Radian6 Topic Profile named “WebMetricsGuru” and gave that information to Cory over at Radian6.   In a few days, after communications are set up between Google Analytics and Radian6 (my account) I will start seeing data from my Google Analytics profile flowing into my Radian6 WebMetricsGuru Topic Profile – that should be very interesting – especially as my book is progressing and all the work I do with analytics informs my thinking.

In other words, I get my ideas and insights by the problems I tackle and solve along with the struggles that I don’t solve, but encounter and grapple with.   As my favorite painter Paul Cezanne once said (more or less, can’t find the exact quote) what little bit once learns for oneself, authentically, is worth more than a thousand of someone else’s formulas.  My knowledge comes from my curiosity and willingness to push the edges to find knowledge on my own terms.  Even when we fail, we succeed, at least our failures are “authentic”.

Getting back to the Radian6 Google Analytics Integration, my understanding based on what I heard today is that it can be free for accounts past a certain size (spend) but I don’t want to put any numbers out there as I am not sure I have all the information.

You can see the Google Analytics data in lower part of each black box on the right, above.   I took this from a screen shot Cory showed me today but in a few days I’ll be able to replicate it myself on my own account.

The analytics integration makes sense when your a brand or business and your monitoring not only what people are saying about you, but what of that “buzz” actually lands on your website.  If your “listening” is not site specific, any of the analytics integrations probably don’t make sense (for example, if your listening to allergy conversations about a few brands, but you don’t really own any of them, then there is no point to having analytics integrated).  But if you do have a landing page, something that you want to know about – this analytics integration makes sense.

I mentioned to Cory Hartlen it would be nice if, instead of, or in addition to the analytics integrations herein we also had Comscore Media Metrix data (or Nielsen) mixed in – sorta an extension of Compete.com that is already in R6, but blown out all the way to have demographics, time spent, visits  and so on, based on panel data, for the top 50,000 – 100,000 sites each month.

A very worthy idea to look at, I think.

I was going to write more – there is certainly a lot more to say both about Radian6, but also a few other products and services I found out about recently – but I’m too tired (it’s all that book writing).  I’ll catch up with those topics in my next posts.