Analytics - Help from ClickZ in making the most of Clicktracks

I was reading some backed up ClickZ articles this afternoon (as it seems to be one of the few things my cold infested head can get motivated to do) and I’m finding myself particularly intrigued by all the analytics articles.  Maybe our upcoming implementation of Clicktracks has something to do with that? Some of these things I’ve emailed around before but, I thought i might post my favorites here for future perusing, reference, and group comment as we work toward the implementation of Clicktracks.

I even think it would be very worth our collective time to have everyone involved in the Clicktracks training read these before we have our training sessions that Matt just booked. In all, i think we are poised to make good use of the software. The biggest challenge will be for us all to make enough room in our jobs to do the ongoing analysis as these articles suggest. Maybe my posting questions here will get us one step closer?

I’ve decided to break these into 3 chunks—starting with On preparing to install analytics and On Setup to ensure good data and will follow later with On using analytics and finally On converting Goals into measurements and On Reporting What we are learning.

So, then…

On preparing to install analytics:
Successfully Implementing a Web Analytics System › › › Analyzing Customer Data BY Neil Mason | February 21, 2006

After reading, what do you think? Do we need to write such a plan? Who would write it? I think many of our conversations to date have hit upon many of these things but, maybe we can use these posts to do some recording of that conversation? Seems like we are on track relative to his “advocates” point? And I plan to work toward demonstrating the value relative to some of the web initiatives such as Inquiry lite, the new Academics directory, reflecting blogs… etc… how about some of you?

On Setup to ensure good data:
Three Common Mistakes to Avoid in Web Analytics BY Jason Burby | January 17, 2006

Details here apply more to Jeff and Matt… and we have talked about some of this but the article brings up the following questions from me:
Regarding “holes in the story"… Matt, we are purchasing additional licence? to be able to track the weblogs and the traffic to and from the ccel site? His earlier articles also contain some accuracy benchmarks for us as well.  Thoughts from anyone?

Next time I’ll post on a great 6 part Clickz series On using analytics… or, what we can be doing to get the most out of the software.
Steve