We're starting this year off in geeky, geeky style with advanced tips and tricks that you can use to advance your campaigns using Google Analytics. From integrating GWO with GA and dealing with GA and site search to moving beyond your top ten lists to find important analytics, this newsletter has a host of great topics for the analytics samurai out there.

As a forewarning some of this gets pretty technical (I had to consult our Google Analytics geeks to understand one or two) but I promise that if you slam your way through this you'll learn at least one new thing, and hopefully a bunch.

And if you're finding all of this a little much, but you do want to know more, and you're going to be in the Vancouver area this February (maybe engaging in some winter sport celebration, no?) be sure to come check out two session training titled Really Understanding Google Analytics, covering (really)understanding your implementation and interpreting your Data.

Click here to learn more>>

An Update to the Erik Vasilik's "Poor Man's GWO/Analytics Integration": Using Custom Variables

Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer (GWO): they function similarly, they work differently, and they don't exactly get along - unless you know what you're doing. Based on Erik Vasilik's "Poor Man's GWO/Analytics Integration", Andre Wei uses the GA custom variable code with the newly added multiple custom variable feature of GA to combine GWO conversion tracking with GA's record of cart values, letting you see the dollars and cents of your conversion test.

One might assume that Google site search, being a Google product, would integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics. Safe assumption? No, not really. In fact, if you use multiple search parameters, Google will truncate them, displaying only the last parameter. Our solution? Custom JavaScript that reads the individual search parameters. Click through to the post to see our code.

What is Google Urchin: The difference between Urchin and Google Analytics

We're frequently asked about the difference between Google Analytics and Google Urchin. The standard belief is that Google markets its analytics packages on a "freemium" model, giving a basic "demo" with Google Analytics and saving the juicy hotness of Urchin for paid users. This is not the case. Urchin plays a different role than Google Analytics, providing a combination of tagging and log file analysis that lets you dig deep into individual users, but lacks many of the features that let you gather important insights from Google Analytics. Hence why we suggest that clients install both Urchin and GA.

Google Analytics Traps #6:Subdomain tracking robs AdWords. Blame _setDomainName() or _initData()?

Subdomain tracking can easily confuse conversion goals related to Adwords data. Sure, your adword traffic may be converting, but Google Analytics may refuse to tell you which campaigns are responsible. Brian Katz covers some of the more usual problems and explains how to troubleshoot and solve them.

We've previously written about tracking error 404 pages, but after Google released secondary dimensions in October we rewrote our guide in order to take advantage of these newly available insights. Using this you can gain an extra level of detail on what is causing visitors to bounce, letting you fix problems all the easier.

Analysis Ninjas: Move Beyond The Top Ten. Find Love (/Insights).

Don't obsess over your top ten list. Avinash Kaushik explains that important insights come from pulling juicy tidbits of knowledge out of that massive set of data that your top ten list merely sits upon, and gives some hints on how to mine your long tail data for those sweet, sweet insights.

High prices can change the flavour of a wine, they can change the quality of a table, they change how much you like a lamp. They shape the perceived qualities in things, and there are ways that you can take advantage of this.