Avinash Kaushik is the Analytics Evangelist here at Google. He is, without a doubt, our toughest, most vocal and valued critic and advisor - we couldn't be luckier to have him. He reminds me of a younger, more talkative
Gandalf , the wizard from the
The Lord of The Rings who just knows stuff. Lots of stuff. Basically everything. When it comes to analytics, Avinash is our Gandalf, except Avinash is a much more riveting public speaker.
Here's a quote from Avinash's post:
Arthur C. Clarke said: We have a very long tail of data in web analytics. Tens of thousands of rows of keywords in the Search Report (even for this small blog!). Hundreds and hundreds of referring urls and campaigns and page names and so on and so forth. Yet because we are humans we tend to look at just the top ten or twenty rows to try and find insights. The problem? The top ten of anything rarely changes (except in rare circumstances like a sale or on a pure content – think news – site). He goes on to give great examples of use, and even gets into the math behind the feature. Love that! It's a
must-read post for anyone interested in getting the most out of Google Analytics, or in web analytics as a whole.
We hope you're making use of this new feature. Feel free to let us know in the comments below.
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team
