I AM THE OP (felt like I needed to say that to not break the chain :D )
I feel like your questions were answered - pretty much the answer I'd give.
1) The only cost is cost of a person who has a deep understanding of Google Analytics. Google Analytics courses are hours long but they only teach you the first layer. 2nd and 3rd come with experience - I've been working with GA for about 4 years and there are still things that surprise me, caveats that we sometimes forget about.
Quick example: Beginners will quite often select 2 dates (separately), get number of users from those 2 dates, add them together and say: that's the number of users we had in those 2 dates. But if you selected those 2 dates together, you'd see a lower number. Why? Because a user who visited in both periods would count as 2 if looking at separate dates, but only as 1 if looking together.
2) There isn't anything official but there's lots of blog posts - from great people like Simo Ahava and Julius Fedorovicius. If you're just starting out, I'd recommend sitting down and writing questions you want answering. Default GA implementation will not give you answers to all your questions - they had to create a product that works OK for most, so it doesn't answer specific business questions. The greatest problem with people saying Google Analytics doesn't give them the data they need is they don't start with the question. Examples of tracking I recently implemented because I taught the team to ask questions WHEN they change/implement something:
-Are users printing the pages? Tracking is set up to track when they use browsers print button.
-Do we have any searches on page that return no results? Do we have searches that return too many results?
-How accurate are our results - which position of the result do they normally click on.
Those questions you wouldn't answer with basic setup. By setting up custom event tracking, we can answer them.
Lastly, on the most advanced setup (keep in mind you might not actually need it) - new version of Google Analytics offers free integration with Big Query. This means you get to analyse the data using SQL.
I feel like your questions were answered - pretty much the answer I'd give.
1) The only cost is cost of a person who has a deep understanding of Google Analytics. Google Analytics courses are hours long but they only teach you the first layer. 2nd and 3rd come with experience - I've been working with GA for about 4 years and there are still things that surprise me, caveats that we sometimes forget about. Quick example: Beginners will quite often select 2 dates (separately), get number of users from those 2 dates, add them together and say: that's the number of users we had in those 2 dates. But if you selected those 2 dates together, you'd see a lower number. Why? Because a user who visited in both periods would count as 2 if looking at separate dates, but only as 1 if looking together.
2) There isn't anything official but there's lots of blog posts - from great people like Simo Ahava and Julius Fedorovicius. If you're just starting out, I'd recommend sitting down and writing questions you want answering. Default GA implementation will not give you answers to all your questions - they had to create a product that works OK for most, so it doesn't answer specific business questions. The greatest problem with people saying Google Analytics doesn't give them the data they need is they don't start with the question. Examples of tracking I recently implemented because I taught the team to ask questions WHEN they change/implement something: -Are users printing the pages? Tracking is set up to track when they use browsers print button. -Do we have any searches on page that return no results? Do we have searches that return too many results? -How accurate are our results - which position of the result do they normally click on.
Those questions you wouldn't answer with basic setup. By setting up custom event tracking, we can answer them.
Lastly, on the most advanced setup (keep in mind you might not actually need it) - new version of Google Analytics offers free integration with Big Query. This means you get to analyse the data using SQL.