Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

Before I begin I must apologize for the length of this review, I suffer from acute conciseness deficiency.

Avinash's greatest strength is his humility, and it comes through in this book and his blog in spades. All too often the broader analytic community (which I include myself in), is so caught up in its metrics, graphs, charts, esoteric calculations and acronyms that we forget that our fundamental purpose is to inform and assist in change. Even if we do not lose sight of that goal, we get so caught up in our analysis that we begin to think we know better than anyone else, including the people buying our products/consuming our content.

With the risk of sounding terse, Avinash cuts through all of that crap to right the ship as it were, and his resulting material can be summarized in 5 points.


1. Customers know best - should be self evident but really isn't (get over yourself and start trying to figure out what the customers want because you really don't know).


2. Capture data that can assist said customers - in other words, if the data and other pretty charts you are constructing cannot lead to an insight or action that will assist your customers; you're wasting your time. Yes, even that amazingly color coded spreadsheet with pivot tables and charts bursting out of every cell.


3. Quantitative data is limited in what it can tell you - another pitfall of the analytic community is that we're so caught up in numbers that we rarely stop to consider the source or validity of our observations, a particularly fatal flaw in an emerging industry with less than ideal methods of capture.


4. Context is king - When it comes to data, context is everything and a second piece of data, incorporated with the first, can have powerful effects. As a quick example, page hits, combined with bounce rate (a metric that measures how many people left your page within a predetermined interval), can indicate how many people are truly coming to your website to engage in its content). In other words, if you achieve a 100% increase in hits but 90% of them "bounce", you're not doing as well as if the same site achieved an 80% increase in hits with a 40% bounce rate. A very different conclusion would have been drawn if hits alone were observed in this case.


5. Qualitative data is a key piece of the puzzle - as a corollary of #3, a truly effective analysis of a website will utilize qualitative and quantitative data to help inform ones decisions.



Avinish then does an excellent job of showing how one can go about creating, analyzing and acting out ones web analytics strategy within the framework laid out above. If one has even a cursory understanding of how a website is built and therefore how to input a simple tag into the relevant pages, one can utilize this book to get started analyzing their web traffic in a meaningful way, for free, this instant. In addition, and more importantly, you will have formulated the solid framework and understanding necessary to adapt as the industry changes, something it does at an exciting/terrifying pace. An excellent read.

In depth, easy to read, detailed from a web analytics pro. My only complaint is that he should identify himself as the Evangelist for Google Analytics. He recommends GA because it's free, but he should make it clear that companies that use GA are providing confidential company data to Google that could be used against them in the pricing of keywords.

I'll keep it short and sweet. This is the ultimate guide for web analytics. Unlike many other books which gloss over the details, this one does not. It is very topical in terms of having up to the minute information about competitors and key players in the industry.

More importantly, it provides a methodology that is more important than how to use the tools and techniques. It is this high level vision of web analytics that will make your implementation a success or not.

He reminds me of a great consultant, but without the BS or sales pitch. I recommend this book to all levels of readers!

Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics: An Hour a Day provides a realistic and practical approach to understanding and using web analytics. I strongly recommend that you read this book if you use any web analytics tool or are just looking to improve the results on your website.

From the simple metrics such as "bounce rate" (where a visitor comes to your website and then leaves immediately) to more complex qualitative analysis this book steps you through the key things that you need to know.

It is a book that can be picked up and put down as needed, you don't need to read it cover to cover to get significant value from this book.

Buy this book if you want to get results from your website using web analytics.

This book should be a mandatory read for those of us who are tasked with web analytics reporting. Like many, we are asked from management to produce weekly top-down reports based on click-throughs and pageviews, new visitors, etc. Clearly, there is much more actionable data you can and should be reporting on.
This book will help you understand how to do just that. It also provides you with information on how to communicate the importance of effective analytics to those who can influence change.