You can tell which GAACs have no clients by observing their activity on the GAAC mailing list.

… that is all…

Overall I felt that the summit was great, and a lot of information was circulated to those who could stop bloody twittering for five seconds to listen.

I really don’t understand 70% of the people who attended the summit. That 70% sat through every single day with their laptops open – blogging, tweeterizing, facebooking, skyping, etc. The guy in front of me was litteraly writing Twitter stuff like “I am sitting in the GAAC summit listening to Avinash.” Well, no, you stupid twerp, you are not listening to anything, you are wasting your company’s money and using pointless antisocial media tools in order to increase the size of your ego. And by golly, you would bloody realize it if you actually WERE paying attention.

And yes, there’s me, advocating actually paying attention, meanwhile observing the person sitting in front of me instead of the actual speaker. Classic, eh?

But it really riled my nerves to see so many people who ‘live’ on web 2.0. You are all a bunch of vegetables. If you have 200 friends on facebook and spend all day telling them what you’re doing – I think you’re pathetic (and damnit NOT becaue you ‘only’ have 200 friends on Facebook!!!). If you’re spending thousands of dollars on attending a summit at Google, and your activity there is limited to describing the free food you get on the internet  - then, I think you’re worthless as a human being.

Thanks to all who created the summit. I personally got a lot of value from it, and I hope the format doesn’t change much for next year.

The gist of such requests:

Hi,

I own a website for my little newspaper stall, which sells newspapers and magazines on the corner of 5th and Maine.

I am starting to get some traffic to my site, sometimes up to 50 visitors per day. I have heard that Google Analytics can increase my website traffic and help me to earn more money with my business.

I have a budget of $200 to spend on getting it set up and running for my website http://bobs-newspaper-stall.free-website-community.com/

Please let me know if you are interested.

Bob

My keyboard and desk is literally littered with the hairs I’ve pulled from my head when reading such emails.

So I’m writing a post here, the link to which I can send as a standard response to such emails.

Let me deconstruct what is making me angry about such emails.

1. 50 visitors per day

This is great, good job. Firstly though, how do you measure this amount of visitors? Are you one of those evil nasty website owners who uses a ‘hit counter’ on their site? Do you already have some statistics software installed, or some kind of log analyzer? Why do you need Google Analytics then? Is there additional data you wish to see? Which data?

How many visitors do you expect a traffic analytics software can give you? Do you understand that counting eggs doesn’t increase the number of eggs?

If you are getting 50 real visitors per day, have you given any thought to promoting your website?

2. I hear good things about Google Analytics

I hear good things about the Hubble Telescope, but that doesn’t mean I need one so I can see the sky. Google Analytics is a turbo diesel-powered pneumatic sledgehammer of a piece of software. There are, of course, simple pneumatic sledgehammers, or plain sledgehammers, or even just little hand-held hammers available to you. Do you need the planet-smashing power of Google Analytics, when you just want to tap a nail?

You have to understand that when you ask me to dig a mile-wide hole for you to plant a tiny seed into, I am going to wonder exactly what is going to grow from that seed. State your goals, or you have none.

Understand what you’re asking someone to do. You can learn yourself about Google Analytics, about website promotion, about the internet in general, which you should do, if you ever want to run a successful website. Don’t just throw money somewhere and expect to make a profit.

3. You want to spend $200

Ok good, you have a budget.  That means that somewhere you have calculated your potential revenue and profit and have decided that you should spend $200. On what? On your website? On promoting your website? On promoting your business? On hiring someone to ‘fiddle’ with your website?

Google Analytics is free. Documentation on how to install it is free. What do you expect to gain from hiring some guy to help you see statistics about your visitors? Do you have an action plan, incase you see some trends in the data?

4. My website is on blah-blah-keyword-blah-keyword.free-website-hosting.com

Unless you want to attract the very lowest-budget customers to your site, stop being a cheapskate and get a proper domain name. $10 is all you need.

Also get those damn keywords and damn hyphens outta there…!

And that, folks, ends my rant for today.

It’s not possible to find out which questions were answered incorrectly, and that’s a bit frustrating. I think I may have got a couple of the multiple-choice questions wrong, but I’d really like to know which ones, so I can fix my brain.

Additionally, where is my super-awesome certificate which that other person got?

In all, the answers were quite easy and straight-forward, so don’t be worried if you have not taken the test and wish to do so. The only issues I had was with the language they used, which in many cases was not clear and used quite poor grammar (typical of Google).

The real quality of the test came through at the end, when a gigantic message was displayed on the screen:

“You may now close your browser. You can close your browser by clicking on the ‘x’ in the upper right of the window.”

The test costs $50 (I had a voucher which meant it was free), so perhaps this is some ’smart’ Google employee’s way of making a quick buck from vain Analytics users.

But wait – it seems that someone has passed it already, in December.

Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ)

Congrats to you, Samantha A Bedford. It seems like this examination was actually first offered in November, and the big news we’re hearing about now is that it’s going to simply be made compulsory. It must be my own fault for never hearing anything about this before.

Well, there’s not much information available about it so far, but I’ll be taking this test during the week and will provide a bit of an insight. I assume it will be much simpler than the GAAC entrance examination. Eva Woo has even stated this.

In addition to her statement, Ms Woo said that each GAAC will receive two free tokens to sit the exam. At our company we’re going to push for four people to sit it, and I assume the cost for the other two examinees will be minimal.

There’s a link to the document in PDF format on the right.

A brief look at the contents:

Forward
Prerequisites
Future Compatibility
Updates and Revisions
How Experiments Work
A/B Experiments
Detailed Explanation of MVT Experiments
The Conversion Page
Setting Up Experiments
Background
Standard Experiments
Non-Standard Experiments (Testing Static Content)
Background
Setting up Multivariate Tests
Experiments with Dynamic Content
Background
Option 1 – Use a MVT experiment and custom JavaScript
Option 2 – Use an A/B experiment.
Advanced Stuff
Other Advanced Stuff
Segmenting traffic

Well, here’s my opinion on the majority of the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants.

Put it this way: If Google stuck a needle and thread up their bum, a GAAC would be the first person walking around with freshly darned socks.

My gripes go further than that.

Why does every new GAAC feel they have to introduce themselves on the mailing list? Nobody gives two hoots about you – and you know, you’re just one more gilled creature flapping around in the sludge. You’re another competitor.

One of these people even started an email about GAAC ‘etiquette’ – the gist of which is essentially ‘let’s share clients’. Well I’m sorry, pal, but that’s not the way it works, and that sure as hell isn’t the way the client should conduct their business. The client should end up with the best possible consultant. If you are not as good as the next guy – then get better. Don’t expect any grace, the GAACs are vultures (generally they wear pink fluff and prance around like flamingos if Google is watching, though).

Oh the GAACs sure do crinkle my collar.

Look at this, which some GAAC made during a ’summit’ (I’d rather call it the ‘world-class brown-nosing championships’): Warning: this is utterly disgusting.

If you can get past the first few moments, then I fear you’ve lost all humanity.

Another thing: They write emails with subjects like ‘News from Caleb’ – as though everyone is sure as hell to know who he is. What a bigshot. Well done Caleb, we all really needed your ‘update’ full of links to your company website.

Before I forget to mention, there’s a GAAC Jesus. His name is Avinash or something, and if you ever want to survive in that world, you better creak your knees a bit and place your moistened lips against his gnarled and hairy feet.

Disclaimer: I am sure that there’s one or two of these Google consultants which is actually a thoroughly decent human being. Probability is with me on this. I just haven’t met any. Well there is one Irish girl who keeps her mouth shut. That counts.