This will serve as a scratchpad post for URL link builders.  As tracking becomes more complex and meaningful, the tagging requirements are more exact.  Many vendors and analysts have developed tools to get more consistent results by more web analytics users.

• Google Analytics Tag Builder  (official)
• Webtrends Tag Builder (official)
• Adobe (Omniture) SiteCatalyst) Tag Builder tool (unofficial)
• Analytics Campaign Tracking URL Builder for Piwik (official)

(A quick search did not turn up tag builders for Coremetrics or Yahoo! Analytics, but as I find other tag builders, I’ll add them.)

If you’ve struggled with Custom Reports in Google Analytics, here’s the ticket for you! Crowdsourced Google Analytics Custom Reports at CustomReportSharing.com.. I struggled with custom reports as well, but that was in the Webtrends world – until I took a class. Finally Dimensions and Metrics made sense in my head. So click over to CustomReportSharing.com after you peruse a couple more posts here. Pick up a few new ideas to try and… Enjoy!

I always wanted to try Yahoo! Web Analytics, but never met anyone using it because in order to access the product, it was necessary to be a Yahoo Business customer. So to me it is no surprise that this product is going away.

Everything I read about Yahoo! Web Analytics stated it was a good offering. I can’t understand why Yahoo! didn’t open access to the tool, except that it would have become necessary to devote resources to supporting it. Hopefully any new technology involved in the product will be used to enhance other products in the future – I hate to see this product go even though it was not really accessible to the world. I may recycle the book written about this product by Dennis Mortensen, which I purchased at Ollies Closeouts – it won’t be much use any more except as a paperweight. Goodbye YWA!

No, the miracle isn’t that I’m making the first post in nearly three months! (If you only knew the rest of the story!)

The miracle is that a new, publicly available book about SiteCatalyst will be published in Fall 2012 by Adam Greco (aka the omni-man). This is the best news I’ve heard in quite some time since I discovered the Key Metrics report in SiteCatalyst 15 which lets you put various measures together in a single report.

Anyone who has read Adam’s blog (see blogroll below, right) knows he is quite the expert in SiteCatalyst since the Omniture days. So I have high expectations for the upcoming book. And I’m thankful the book is actually coming out for the public!

I hope to post more often in the coming days – until next time!

You’ve already used some or all of the tools in this list, but in case you have not, the list includes links to Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Page Rank Checker and more. One caveat, they need to delete Yahoo Site Explorer and add Bing Webmaster Tools.

For social media analysts, take a look at this list of 20 Social Media Monitoring Tools also at LunarPages.com’s blog page. Some of these are fee-based, but many are free such as SocialMention.com, my new favorite.

Tagless web analytics has recently been a popular topic on the Yahoo! Groups Web Analytics discussion. One of the vendors, AtomicLabs, offers its Pion solution. I’m interested in the concept. More to come…

This is my first photo post… it’s one of the more interesting scribbles Lee would give me as I went out the door on the way to work every day. 

Turns out setting up a WordPress blog with GoDaddy (free plug for them and props too!) was easier and quicker than I expected.   As you can see, I’ve got a few moments left over to write a few posts! 

Hi – this is Mitchell Teixeira and welcome to my blog, Once In A Web.

This site will be a place where I can rant, rave and generalize about what I like (or not),  what I’m working on, and what I’m interested in.  Enjoy!