The fear that sites using older code will one day suddenly stop receiving any data is overblown, to say the least.
There has been some hullabaloo about how long Google will continue supporting urchin.js, the older version of the Google Analytics tracking code. It was marked as deprecated more than a year ago, and they stopped making updates to it. The future is certainly with ga.js.
"Web Analytics Software" is a misnomer. Web analytics tools don't analyze data. They report metrics.
Reporting vs. Analyzing
At first glance, that distinction may seem trivial. When you consider it, though, there is a world of difference between telling me what happened in the past and telling me what I should do going forward.
The Google Analytics API is secure, lightweight and flexible. It lays the foundation for the future of web analysis.
The long-awaited Google Analytics API has been released. Developers around the globe are tinkering with it to make programs and applications that can leverage your Google Analytics data in new and profound ways.
So, just what is the API? How does it work? What features are available? Where do we go from here?
If you're relying on "conversions" to measure your marketing you're not seeing the whole picture.
One of the primary reasons for using Google Analytics is to make decisions about your marketing efforts. After analyzing reports, you should be able to answer the question, "What do I do now?" Do you stop a marketing campaign because it's not working? Do you beef up another one that is surprisingly successful?
There are all these words you thought you understood.
Google Analytics uses many terms. Some of them seem familiar. Others are a little more vague. Some are defined differently by everybody.
This post will attempt to clarify some definitions and common questions. If it were comprehensive, it would probably take too long to scroll through, so let's imagine that this is a first take for now.
Why would you waste your time analyzing reports if you don't know what you're looking for?
I don't know either, but most companies do at one point or another. Some companies do it consistently day after day. You probably did it today. Yeah, you.
It's a matter of excluding the outliers from your survey.
I'm surprised that there is ever any question about the value of filtering out internal traffic from web analytics reports. Imagine a Gallup poll that included responses from Gallup employees. The credibility of that poll would be dubious. Not because all Gallup employees would respond differently than the population at large, but because some of them might--and we wouldn't know which ones or whether they did. It would just be untrustworthy data. Because we wouldn't know to what extent it was impure, we wouldn't even be able to make good guesses about how to interpret that data.
Well, okay, that's a bit harsh, but I prefer to set expectations low and then pleasantly surprise you. In fact, web analytics can be really, really cool. But you have to understand what its limitations are and how to use it.
