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Web Analytics 2.0

webanalytics

I was going to take a class on web analytics but instead, I decided to read Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. First, this guy is legitimate. He’s an analytics evangelist for Google (wait… I’m totally a digital marketing evangelist.) Note to self: Use those search terms on TheLadders tonight.

The book contains a cool first page – It’s a $25 Adwords gift card from Google. I know some of you do, but I refuse to believe that the little guy has become the establishment. They’re just a little bigger now, and we can get cool gift cards and advice from their evangelists now because of it.

Back to the book… By the time I got to page 5, I was convinced.  He really DOES know what he’s talking about here.  I too was sooooo excited about all the data I got from my WebTrends but amazed at how little “actionable insight” I actually had.  I just had all that data but I didn’t know how to make it mean something.  He, correctly in my opinion, attributes this to clickstream data being great at the what but not at the why.

I really like the way he explains the paradigm of web analytics graphically.  The insights are still a part of it, but there are other things to quantify and measure, like voice of the customer and competitive intelligence.

That’s where I’ll end this post because… well I gotta get back to reading.  I will end on this cool fact I learned from the book.  Did you know there are websites that will compare your website’s performance to your competitors??  How COOL is that?  The one he talks about in the book is www.compete.com.  At a glance it seems that you may need to create a free profile to get some cool insights but it seems GREAT.  Adding competitive data to your insights is useful and probably new for a lot of us, not yet working in a company that has an an analytics evangelist.

I’m going to keep reading but I have a feeling my recommendation will only get more insistent.

Cool Blog Alert:
Avinash has a blog on web analytics and if you’re into that, you may want to bookmark: www.kaushik.net/avinash.