I along with a few friends from Twitter attended the Google Analytics Conversion University Conference at Gurgaon. This was the first such conference by Google Analytics in India and we were lucky enough to be a part of it. The agenda of conference included introduction of GA for begineers, sharing more about their partnership programs, advanced features, adsense/adwords integration, webmaster tools and website optimizer.

The conference had about 100 attendees(or less?) from mostly, sem/ppc background. Folks from Digital Agencies and SEM companies formed the major chunk. Interestingly enough about one third of the attendees were from outside Delhi/NCR, with people from Mumbai and Kerala forming a considerable chunk. Most of the speakers too were from outside of Delhi with Jesse coming straight from Mountain View to present at the conference.

Given the professional and business oriented audience, the content was strictly focussed around getting most out of GA and eventually how you can use it to get more/spend less $$. The thing about analytics is that everyone knows it but not everyone does it, so the conference was a good reminder that you need to actually checkout the data being captured and use it to drive results.

Jesse made his point by saying “Not having goals on GA is like being a 35 year old guy who doesn’t have a job and doesn’t know what to do with his life, no goals” . So if you too haven’t configured goals in your GA, it’s time to do it and if you don’t know how to go about it, ping  me.

Tracking Bounce Rate, Outgoing Traffic, Custom Segmentation etc were some other things that I was reminded to spend some time on. BTW Are you tracking them ?

The best thing about Google Analytics(other than the fact that it works) is that its FREE, free not just for individuals but free for enterprises. Isn’t that cool ? Another great thing is that you as individual get access to the same set of features that an enterprise gets, i.e. it’s not that the free version has lesser features than paid enterprise ones.

Is it a good question to ask if Google Analytics is free, how does  Google benefit ?
Vivek, one of the speakers mentioned that amongst other things GA drives more money to adwords. Fair enough

All in all, GA conf @ Google’s gurgaon office was a fun event with great learning and networking opportunity.Good food and free wi-fi were nice addons.

You can also checkout people’s tweets by searching for hashtag #gacu

Thanks to the guys at getgaready for organizing it.

Conference Goodies

1) GA Tooth Brush: Yes, a Tooth Brush that reads “promoting good website hygiene”

2) GA Thumb/Pen Drive:

3) GA Tee-Shirt:

Update: Here’s Tatvic’s presentation on Conversion Tracking from the conference