From the Editor:

Christmas time is coming up and, with it, a million decisions and in-decisions that will make or break your holiday season. There's emails to go out, keywords to watch, PPC traffic to bid on. With competition at its height, there's little room for guess work.

Which is why this is the season to be analytic.

To help you through the month, we've got tips and tricks from the analytics department, including debugging Google Analytics and GWO, understanding Urchin, prettying up your reports, and more.

And, of course, you need to have analytics installed for any of this. If you're still flying blind, you might want to contact us.

GA Basics: Regex and Google Analytics

Regex in Google Analytics is an oft misunderstood beast. Used to construct filters or define data to be pulled from the Google API, it's feature set is rich... but analytics implementation of it is limited. In this post, Kent lists of a few of the more useful regex functions that you can use in GA, as well as a few ways that you can use Regex to learn more from your data.

Data is data, right? Who cares how it looks? Well, everyone who has to read charts will tell you that well built charts can add new dimensions to your data, calling attention to information that you would not otherwise notice.

In this post, Kent explains how to turn your Google Analytics data into colorful and eye catching presentations using Adobe Illustrator.

Newbie SEO: A Google Analytics Custom report for blogs

Never really sure how to use GA on your blog? Finding yourself using GA to count "hits"? In this post, Kent explains how a simple Google Analytics custom report can show you what topics to focus more time and attention on.

What is the difference between Urchin and Google Analytics - Urchin 7 Edition

With Urchin 7 out, more people are asking how exactly Urchin differentiates itself from Google Analytics, and in what setting they should be using either. In this post, we look at the difference between Google analytics and Google urchin, including some of the new features of Urchin 7.

Not so! Even if these things are free, you've still made a commitment to your users, and under-performing with these can hurt your users trust.

Having both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer running at once causes all kinds of problems for some people. In this post, Brian looks at some of the reasons that these two applications can clash with each other, how to trouble shoot it, and how you can fix certain cases.

From the Net:
3 Awesome, Downloadable, Custom Web Analytics Reports

Custom Reports are great tools. For people learning Web Analytics, they provide data structured in such a way that it doesn't just provide actionable insights but also teaches how to look at data. For experienced analysts, they provide a way to look at data that they wouldn't ordinarily think of.