Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: leveraging the power of web analytics
Comment: I got this book a couple of days ago. It is my first book on web analytics and was definitely great start for me in this field.
If you have a website and are making money from it or plan on making money from it and dont know much about web analytics yet, the following tips I got from the book should help make your website more profitable and thus make the book pay for itself many times over:
- Using internal search analytics to gain important insights about your website's visitors and optimizing for internal searches to improve user experience to make your site more profitable (on average 10% of a website's visitors are using internal search to navigate it according to the author). This one was probably my favorite chapter in the book!
- a link to a (free) demographic prediciton tool that allows you to check how many % of searchers for a keyword/visitors of a (competing) website are male/female + their age distribution.
Obviously such a tool cannot pinpoint the exact percentage, as it analyzes the data from a data sample. I have already checked this by typing in terms such as dress (73% female), dresses (80% female), sewing (73% female), crocheting (82% female, with a low percentage of under 34 year olds and a very high percentage of 50+ year olds - just as expected). I also checked a few URLs such as [...](67% male) and [...] (78% female)...and think it can give a good tendency.
However, you should also apply common sense and take the insights as tendencies and not as exact values when using this tool to analyze demographic data (which you should do with ANY keyword research tool out there! If youve done keyword research before you should be more than aware of this).
- Why overall conversion rate is nothing but a "nice-to-know-metric" and what you should do if you want to get real insights from analyzing and measuring conversion rate that can actually help you increase your conversion rate. I never knew how silly it was to dwell on "(overall) conversion rate". Now, I know though...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Awesome book
Comment: "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day" is a real good book. I just received few days back and I am not able to leave it till I finish. I liked the contents and the way it is written. In short, I simply love the book.
--Bhupendra
Customer Rating:
Summary: An 'added value' bookfor your library
Comment: I pre-ordered my book over a month ago...it was well worth the wait!!
'Web Analytics: An Hour a Day' provides clear and concise information on how to best utilize the tools out there for measuring data for you web site. This book is an excellent resource for task-oriented realists who want to find a way to improve their Web site's search engine rank.
Avinash does a great job in guiding the reader to understand how to take into account user behavior. Why? With so much data to decipher from reports and graphs, you begin to develop a better sense of what the numbers are really telling you.
For those who are diving into using and understanding web analytics, this book is indispensable! The book is loaded with numerous examples, but is enriched even more with Avinash's input helping decipher the 'what', 'how', and 'why'.
Reading Avinash's book will help you look at websites differently, and how to make better use of the data that's collected with your company's WA tools. The devil is in the details. This book helps you sort our those little devils.
Avinash, well done my friend!
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Best Book on the Topic
Comment: Avinash Kaushik is the best blogger on the web to write on the subject of web analytics and his book "Web Analytics an Hour a Day" is the best in its class. Web Analytics can be a very hard topic to write about (and still keep your readers awake!)but Avinash has a great way of breaking down complex ideas so that anyone at any skill level can understand them and begin using the techniques right away.
This book was an easy read and appropriate for people just beginning their discovery of web analysis or those seasoned pros who thought they knew everything! (After reading the book you will find that you will definitely learn something new - I certainly did!)
This book breaks down all aspects of web analysis. Most books of this type will belabor the what? and the how? with little mention of the why?. Avinash does a wonderful job of giving you the insight to understand user behavior so you are not just getting lost in thousands of charts and graphs and instead begin making sense of what reports actually tell you something.
It is my great belief that if you decide to buy this book you will immediately begin associating yourself with a higher class of web marketer. Web Analytics is the future of the web, and this book is an awesome opportunity for you to make your website(s) begin to actually work for you.
My last mention is that all of the proceeds from the book go to charity. So what do you have to loose?
If I could give 6 stars I would. This book is the best in its class!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: 90% fluff, 10% knowledge...good if you have time to read 480 pages to get the 48 you need
Comment: The sheer size and length drove me away from keeping this book after getting through the first 200 pages. Let's face it...not everyone wants to spend their summer reading 480 pages to get through 90% fluff to extract the good stuff, especially in the summer time. In an ideal world, I'd love to have a succint, terse and to-the-point 100 page version with just the key takeaways because I know Avinash is one of the top thought drivers in the field in large part due to his spectacular blog.
Honestly If I want 480, I'd go for Clinton's biography. I know the flip side is everyone saying the 230 extra pages is great but for busy people like me this makes me unable to touch with a 6 foot rod.
Kaushik's book has a lot of theoretical learnings many of which are more pie-in-the-sky ideas, e.g control charts and standard deviations that are good carryovers if you are process-oriented and have time to implement these icing-on-the-cake schemes while detracting away from the core cake (driving ROI).
If you want a good book recommendation go for Actionable Web Analytics. It's amazing how much of a spin they put on the ROI aspect of the business. At the end of the day, this is what we all here in business for. Dynamic Prioritization and Monetization (2 chapters in Actionable Web Analytics) are incredible for anyone in this field!
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