Thursday, January 16, 2014

Dreaming about Analytics

The last year happened to be an year in which I did more online shopping than any other year and an interesting fact is that most of my orders were diapers and other baby products ;)

Being from a technology background, my inquisitiveness lead to an interesting consequence on my interest towards how these e-commerce sites work.

It is always exciting to see how amazon, ebay, flipkart and a few others websites recommend me the products I am indeed looking for. Moreover, there were instances when I saw ads of the baby products on websites on which I did not expect to see them, and then realized those ads were of exactly the same products I viewed sometime ago on a baby store.

Well, all this made me curious each day and then I got to hear about analytics from +Karandeep Singh. This marked the beginning of my journey on the road called Digital Analytics.

When I asked more about this from the Big G, I found that Google Analytics is one of the tools that enables these websites to add to their smartness by knowing what users are looking for and hence showing them the right content (in order to maximizing the website's profits).

And while I was already looking to expand my skills, I saw this infographic from +Google Analytics. It pushed me more to tread on this new found path and since then there was no stopping. I created my own Google Anaytics account and started experimenting. It gave me a lot of insights on how our perceived notion about site usage statistics can change when we have a look at the results shown by Google Analytics.


I started enjoying looking at the reports and the first actionable insight (thanks to +Avinash Kaushik for this word) I worked upon was trying to reduce the bounce rate of the most visited pages of SikhiSidak.com (a social organization I work with) and it really worked!

And it was last month when I decided to get certified with GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification). Thanks to the awesome videos by +Justin Cutroni, it was not hard for me the grasp what all could Google Analytics do. The icing on the cake were the tough questions on www.googleanalyticstest.com (a great project by +Eric Fettman) which pumped me up with confidence to give the certification which requires a minimum score of 80% to pass it.

And then the day came, I took a deep breath and sat for the online GAIQ certification exam and passed it with 94% .. 



.. and the journey is still on and I am still dreaming about analytics. Let's see how it goes :)


Tip: Use the promotion code given here to get 50% discount on GAIQ exam fee.
Not sure how long it works but it worked for me!