I’ve been heinously busy the last two week with end of month and beginning of month client work, so this site has seen no improvements or work whatsoever, except that my host upgraded my WP for me. Thanks guys!

But I did manage to get through my Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GoogleIQ). If you don’t know what that is and want to, here’s the GA IQ FAQ, which should get you your daily dose of abbreviations all in one go, but the gist of it is:

The Google Analytics Individual Qualification is a proof of proficiency in Google Analytics

and of course Google Analytics is:

a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service

Which is to say, I’m now officially certified as being reasonably competent to analyze statistical information about website traffic and use said data to make decisions that will improve traffic or conversions or what-have-you.

I have to say, taking the test reminded me of taking the SATs rather a lot. Logic questions, multiple choice, the I, II, III questions–it’s all very SAT-like. Which is perfectly fine with me, I’m pretty good at that sort of format in general. But I would not have wanted to take the exam without at least as much GA experience as I have, I don’t think.

On the other hand, I scored…rather well.

And I have to drop a thank you to Jens Sorensen, who put together a blog post containing full notes from Google’s Conversion University training videos. I’m not an audio learner at all, so video isn’t a great medium for me to learn a new thing. I watched all the training vids and didn’t absorb nearly all of it, then later read through Sorenson’s notes post and picked up huge chunks of information I’d missed entirely. Obviously “go read a book about it” isn’t the best way to train a lot of people, but it does work on me.