What is the analytics alphabet?
The Adido Analytics Alphabet is a 63 page online guide containing 73 useful hints and tips for making data analysis and interpretation easier and friendlier. Focused on Google Analytics the guide is organised into three colour coded levels to match the degree of difficulty/understanding involved, and each tip is associated with a letter of the alphabet:
- Fundamentals (blue) – these are the features and tips which all analytics users should be aware of
- Intermediate (red) – for regular users of analytics, these tips help you get a little bit more into the detail
- Advanced (black) – focused on conversion reporting, these are key insights for the direct response marketer
To aid with understanding and interpretation each tip has also been classified into one of eight categories ranging from setup and traffic source tips, to ecommerce specific and insight tips.
Take a look now, and hopefully (like me) you’ll learn at least one new thing.
Who’d have thought a drive to devon could be so productive
When I was asked to present a workshop at LDD on analytics I contemplated what and how I was going to do a 45 minute talk on analytics which was both interesting enough and practical at the same time. On a long old drive home to Devon I came up with the idea of creating a glossary of analytics terms with helpful advice on how to analyse data. When I arrived safely at my destination I checked to see whether an A-Z type guide already existed (obviously I couldn’t do that whilst driving), and surprisingly it didn’t. After jotting down the letters of the alphabet I tested my knowledge of analytics by assigning relevant tips to each letter. Although I was stumped by the letter X (and cheated on the letter Y) I could cover off nearly all letters, so the Analytics Alphabet was born.
The driving force behind the Adido analytics alphabet
Now I know that Google Analytics has a really good help centre and forum community – but sometimes you just need a little extra help to get you started, and this is where the Analytics Alphabet comes in – it’s the starting point to a very prosperous and (hopefully) rewarding journey into analytics interpretation and setup for clients, marketers, and colleagues alike.
Written with my appreciation of my clients’ and colleagues questions surrounding analytics in mind and from my own experience of using the platform, the guide evolved into a multi-layered internal and external resource. With a little help from Adido’s budding analytics whizz Suzana, over 14,500 words were written for the first draft of the guide. This was of course cut down to make the guide as you see it now – but these words will be used to develop blog posts and presentations in the future – so keep an eye out for more in-depth advice.
This is not the end…
The original intention was to have tips for every letter of the alphabet, and whilst this is still the case, it became essential to have a degree of difficulty indicator to help categorise the tips. So whilst all the letters were covered, they have been split up by their difficulty rating.
The 63 page guide is also by no means an exhaustive list of tips, and during my time compiling it I discovered many more useful posts on the web by other avid analytics gurus. The Google Analytics interface also changed during the creation of this guide, making it almost out of date before it was even released! So let’s just say, for now, it is a first edition of what I hope, are many more to come…
Want to contribute?
Feel free to tweet your own analytics tips to me @digiKherrin and you never know, they could make it into the next edition.
Want to read the guide? Click here.
