By Jerri Ledford & Mary Tyler
336 Pages
http://www.amazon.com/Google-Analytics-2-0-Jerri-Ledford/dp/047017501X

Google Analytics is a tool you can use to understand how visitors behave when they visit your web site.  It goes well beyond other "web stats" software, and the book even points out the benefits and drawbacks of using Google Analytics versus a popular web stats program named AWStats.  Google purchased a web analytics firm named Urchin in late 2005, re-branded the product Google Analytics v1.0, and began offering the service free of charge.  The response was overwhelming, with a 1/4 million new accounts overnight.  It seems Google had under-estimated the market and had to turn people away while they began to redesign the system to be more scalable and more usable for the average webmaster or mildly technical business person.  Out of this, Google Analytics v2.0 was born.

There is a ton of out-of-the-box functionality built into Google Analytics, but if a user never goes beyond that they will miss out on some of the biggest benefits that can be found in features like goals, and custom filters.  These features can be used to track the success of your web site, your marketing efforts, and your products and services ... which could be important.  This book presents these fairly complex concepts in plain language that anyone who is fairly technical can understand.

The book also explains how to setup profiles and other users so that multiple people in an organization can have access to the reports.  This is pretty easy to do, but again the book explains it in such a way that almost anyone can understand the importance of assigning users to a particular profile and the differences in roles (i.e. reports only or account administrator).

It also walks you through each report section of Google Analytics, and gives you an overview of what each report is displaying, it's drill-down capabilities, and any assumptions or "gotchas" that might exist to help you understand the data behind the report.  It also points out a few real-world business uses of a few of the reports, and how you can leverage a particular report to make business or design decisions ... which also could be important.

Overall, I think this is an essential manual for anyone who wants to get the most out of Google Analytics.  Like I said, the software really has a lot of power and functionality out-of-the-box, but if you can go beyond that into some of the more custom features you will get a lot more value out of it ... and this book helps you get there.  Its an easy, light read and most people can probably read it in just a few sittings.  I would recommend it to anyone in your organization that is going to ever log into Google Analytics.