Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: If you want to learn about web analytics, start here
Comment: I have read several web analytics books and Avinash's book is definitely the one I would recommend first.
What you can learn from the book:
- how to think about and how to approach web analytics -- this is where this book excels
- how to deliver actionable results - the mantra of Avinash
- how to start with the basic metrics
What not to expect from this book:
- you will not learn how to use any analytics software
- you will not learn details about the technical aspects, frequent problems with data and measurement, what to avoid etc.
Check out Avinash's blog to get a picture of what you can get from the book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What analytics, (web or otherwise), should be
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: One Of The Best Internet Marketing Books I've Ever Read
Comment: Thank you, Avinash! Avinash has done the impossible: he's made analytics fun, easy-to-understand, and clearly communicated how analytics is even more important than many of us have treated it. Avinash's "Trinity" approach of creating actionable insights & metrics from focusing on the right clickstream data, doing the right kind of customer research, all of which leads to knowing how to produce the right kind of dashboard. If you buy only one book on analytics, this has to be it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best book on the subject
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Must Have!
Comment: 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!
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