Raven offers the Google Analytics Configuration Tool, a little “sitelet” (focused microsite) which offers 8 tools to help folks jump start their Google Analytics setup. Most interesting are the complex setups such as sub-domains and multi-domain setups, as well as event tracking configuration and a URL builder for campaigns such as SEM links and email links.

In the middle of all this setup work, many advanced users hosting multiple tracking tags on their sites are using Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics and other top WA (er, should I say, DA?) tools. I just found this post from Lothaire, who related his experience implementing an updated Webtrends tag using Google Tag Manager. Brett Hale has integrated SiteCatalyst (now Adobe Analytics) tags using GTM as well. I’m working now myself with Adobe Tag Manager. I’ll keep you posted with my notes going forward. First note is that I haven’t found much info about using a Data Layer (a/k/a analytics layer or universal variable) with SiteCatalyst tags. Wonder why?

Sorry for the long dry spell – it’s been a busy time lately and I’ll soon have some new items up related to recent work and research into web analytics Tag Management using Adobe Tag Manager, SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, GTM and Google Analytics.

But first, here’s a great article about Mobile SEO recently posted on Search Engine Land. Enjoy these hot, slow, long summer days!

I don’t see much written on linear conversion reports like you might think. They are a great way to monitor key metrics on a website, such as the steps in a site’s conversion funnel. While I have long known how to get these reports running in Adobe SiteCatalyst, I had never tried creating one in Google Analytics (tsk, tsk!!) until now. So, if you’re interested in learning how to get these reports for your own GA account, here’s a great how-to article from Tim Leighton-Boyce at CXFocus.com entitled Get an Instant Checkout Health Check with this one-stop Report. The important thing about this post I’m citing is that it has been revised multiple times with more relevant information and improvements.

Enjoy, and please share your results, time permitting!

PS – I haven’t tried creating a horizontal conversion funnel in Webtrends – has anyone else tried?

ClickZ is working towards coining a new term, Convergence Analytics, and so in writing this post, I guess I’m helping with that process. Besides sounding cool, it does nicely summarize what we’ve been doing the hard way for the past few years: joining data from various analytics tools into a single tool. Of course now, the tools we’re using are more savvy and accept data from other sources and that is what is enabling this convergence of data and data analytics. Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, etc. are able to accept external data and join it with the ‘native’ data captured by the tool and process all the data together to formulate reports. As one of my business colleagues always mutters… ‘there’s never been a better time to be alive… (or a data analyst) with all this innovation around us!”

More to come on this topic – its just going to get better!