If you only buy a book on eBusiness this year, make sure it is Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity.
Written by Avinash Kaushik, Google‘s Analytics Evangelist and blogger, the book is chock full of actionable insight in how to get meaningful data from your eMarketing and Web activity and how to use it to drive commercial performance for your business.
You may think Avinash has written another book about Web Analytics, but his subtitle The Art of Online Accountability & The Science of Customer Centricity says this is not just another book about how to use a tool. The book’s razor-sharp focus from the first page is to enable us to understand what is going on in our websites, why is it happening and what can we test to improve on the value our site brings to our businesses. Throughout the book, you’ll be endelessly told how to identify meaningfyl data, how to ensure you measure outcomes as opposed to just numbers, how to ensure you can trust what the numbers seems to be saying and how to use what you discover to drive commercial improvements.
This isn’t a book about a tool – in fact as a rare end user of Analytics tools I would have liked a bit more depth on how to set up Google Analytics to get some reports. It is a lot more: I may not be any more able to set up the tool, but I am infinitely more able to understand what my business is doing and to ask the right questions -and run the right tests- from my teams running the sites on the ground.
Spending a few hours on planes with this book has been the best investment in professional development I’ve had in a long time. Now it is time to raise the game – our competitors won’t know what hit them!
[…] Be Testing is the perfect companion to Web Analytics 2.0, which I’ve reviewed recently. If you are involved in eBusiness at all, whether in the front […]