Lab Objective
Basic: Introduce you to the power of analytics for understanding the impact of your online strategy, and optimizing it to achieve your objectives and goals. You should feel comfortable with the word analytics, when brought up in discussion.

Advanced: Expose you to more advanced features of Google analytics.

The Big Idea Behind this Lab
The free availability of a tool as powerful and robust as Google Analytics has lead to truly incredible economic growth and advanced the Internet ecosystem as the future of marketing, entertainment, and news/information. GA and similar tools are the logical step two once you have poured creative energy into making something that people want, pouring effort into a data-driven campaign strategy will make more people want more of your something.

Basic Requirements

• Make sure you have introduced yourself to Google Analytics through the analytics presentation page and advance material nuumber 46.
• Login to Google Analytics with the username / password = shiftlearning / [password contained in separate e-mail and posted on LMS]. Note: If you are logged in with your personal Google/Gmail account, you must log out first.
• There are 3 areas and 5 sites to choose from: (1) ethansen: contains data from the class website and an old website setup for the original workshop this class is based on; (2) Pete Kistler Analytics: contains data from a popular blog covering personal branding and a commercial website that offers a professional quality online brand webpage — thanks Pete! And (3) removemybox.com: a mildly-NSFW website that was setup as a class experiment and experienced the “Digg Effect” on 4/17/2008 and 4/22/2008.
• If you have never used analytics before, try a few things to get familiar: (1) click around, a lot — click on anything that looks interesting; (2) Click on anything that has a gray arrow — like the date range at the top, the “Visits” tab, the Visitors and Traffic Sources menu items on the left-hand side; (3) for each page you visit, click on the About This Report link on the left-hand side, under Help Resources — a little pop-up appears that gives you a quick explanation of the report’s significance.
• Pick a site (one or more) to analyze. Browse the various reports (Visitors, Traffic Sources, etc.), various comparison features (click on the date range, and try out the “compare to past” feature; click on the Visits tab and use the comparison features), and various metrics or maps to drill down into the data.
• Generate 3 insights about anything you noticed. Push yourself for interesting, non-obvious insights, but note that you will not be graded on the insightful-ness of your insight.

Advanced Requirements (Must be done in addition to basic requirement for credit)

• Install Google Analytics on your site
• Setup a Conversion Goal
• Setup an “Event”
• Create a Custom Report

Deliverables
Basic: Describe your 3 insights with the supporting data/metrics (screen-shots would be helpful).
Advanced: Add ethansen@gmail.com as a “View Reports” user to your Google Analytics account and add the domain use used for this lab to the ethansen@gmail.com user (skipping this step means that when I login, I can’t see what you created).

Wikis lab

To get started:

Subscribe to this RSS feed.

Or click on the button below:

Tip: sign up for a Google Reader (or iGoogle), NetVibes, BlogLines or MyYahoo account to started experimenting with an RSS Reader.

Online Video Lab from Eric Hansen on Vimeo.

Here’s what a video response looks like on youtube, also notice the Statistics & Data tab:

Here’s what tags look like (many video sites have the same functionality, so you don’t necessarily need to use YouTube):

These are DIFFERENT from tagging your blog post — you must also tag your video, in addition to your blog post.

Don’t forget to test out subscribing to your online video before submitting your lab.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Click the “play” button arrow above to listen to the lab outline.

SU Students: Ignore the instruction to post your podcast to the wiki. There will be an assignment dropbox for the podcasting lab.

Or, you can download the file by clicking here.

http://shiftlab.ning.com/main/

Note: This was setup only as an example social network to communicate the lab guidelines. You do not need to join it or setup a profile on it.

More notes:
You can’t use your Facebook or any other profile for this assignment.

1. Labs are an exercise in creating something new
2. You cannot submit work created outside of this class for credit
3. The lab is intended for you to setup what I’m calling a “space” (because it could be your own network, or a page, group, etc. on an existing network) to gain experience setting up a social network tool and populating it with interesting content.

http://shiftbloglab.blogspot.com/

Note: Blogger.com automatically adds captchas to blogs; the free Wordpress blog has Akismet spam filtering built in. However, please explore the spam filtering and comment moderating technology for whatever platform you choose.