Actionable Web Analytics

Knowing everything you can about each click to your Web site can help you make strategic decisions regarding your business. This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. The authors answer these critical questions—and many more—using their decade of experience in Web analytics.

Companies need more than just web analysts and data-savvy marketers to be successful–they need action heroes! While most of us never battle evil scientists or defuse nuclear warheads, successful web analysts benefit from the same attributes that fictional action heroes embody. As a web analyst, your main goal is to improve your organization’s online performance. You can become an “action hero” by translating analysis insights into action that generates significant returns for your company. How you approach analysis is critical to your overall success. In this book, web analytics expert Brent Dykes addresses the unique challenges facing analysts and online marketers working within small and large companies, teaching you how to move beyond reporting and toward analysis to drive action and change. Taking a principle-based rather than a tool-specific approach, Brent introduces you to the Action Hero Framework that breaks down the analysis process into three key stages: Prioritize (what to analyze), Analyze (how to analyze), and Mobilize (how to drive action). And he reinforces these topics with real-world examples and practical tips from seasoned analysts at leading companies. Defines the type of environment in which action heroes thrive–not just survive–as well as how to defeat the villains of web analytics that stand in the way Arms web professionals with a strategic framework for executing online analysis, as well as an arsenal of analysis techniques Reveals how companies need to be both data-driven and action-agile to drive business value from web analytics For more action hero resources and information, check out the book’s companion site at www.Analyticshero.com. "The ideas in this book will take you days (or even weeks) to work your way through, and they fly in the face of the emotional approach to marketing. The question is: would you rather have your competition lead the way with data and science when it comes to reaching your market, or are you going to go first? That's how it is with action heroes--no guts, no glory." - Seth Godin Author We Are All Weird "Don't let the jaunty, breezy style of this book throw you off. Brent successfully - and entertainingly - packs years of experience into these pages along with case studies and insightful help on getting the most out of web analytics, adding value to your company and boosting your career trajectory." - Jim Sterne Founder of eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, author of "Social Media Metrics" and Chairman of the Digital Analytics Association

Written by an in-the-trenches practitioner, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement a successful Web analytics strategy. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, in his thought-provoking style, debunks leading myths and leads you on a path to gaining actionable insights from your analytics efforts. Discover how to move beyond clickstream analysis, why qualitative data should be your focus, and more insights and techniques that will help you develop a customer-centric mindset without sacrificing your company’s bottom line. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

This lecture presents an overview of the Web analytics process, with a focus on providing insight and actionable outcomes from collecting and analyzing Internet data. The lecture first provides an overview of Web analytics, providing in essence, a condensed version of the entire lecture. The lecture then outlines the theoretical and methodological foundations of Web analytics in order to make obvious the strengths and shortcomings of Web analytics as an approach. These foundational elements include the psychological basis in behaviorism and methodological underpinning of trace data as an empirical method. These foundational elements are illuminated further through a brief history of Web analytics from the original transaction log studies in the 1960s through the information science investigations of library systems to the focus on Websites, systems, and applications. Following a discussion of on-going interaction data within the clickstream created using log files and page tagging for analytics of Website and search logs, the lecture then presents a Web analytic process to convert these basic data to meaningful key performance indicators in order to measure likely converts that are tailored to the organizational goals or potential opportunities. Supplementary data collection techniques are addressed, including surveys and laboratory studies. The overall goal of this lecture is to provide implementable information and a methodology for understanding Web analytics in order to improve Web systems, increase customer satisfaction, and target revenue through effective analysis of user-Website interactions. Table of Contents: Understanding Web Analytics / The Foundations of Web Analytics: Theory and Methods / The History of Web Analytics / Data Collection for Web Analytics / Web Analytics Fundamentals / Web Analytics Strategy / Web Analytics as Competitive Intelligence / Supplementary Methods for Augmenting Web Analytics / Search Log Analytics / Conclusion / Key Terms / Blogs for Further Reading / References

Yahoo! Web Analytics teaches readers how to collect data, report on that data, and derive useful insights using Yahoo!’s free Web analytics tool . This detailed resource from Yahoo!’s Director of Data Insights discusses the why of Web analytics as well as the how while revealing secrets and tricks not documented elsewhere. The thorough book also offers step-by-step instructions and advanced techniques on everything from using data collection groupings to creating compelling data visualizations. It’s a must-read for all analytics professionals and those who want to be.

Use Product Analytics to Understand Consumer Behavior and Change It at Scale Product Analytics is a complete, hands-on guide to generating actionable business insights from customer data. Experienced data scientist and enterprise manager Joanne Rodrigues introduces practical statistical techniques for determining why things happen and how to change what people do at scale. She complements these with powerful social science techniques for creating better theories, designing better metrics, and driving more rapid and sustained behavior change. Writing for entrepreneurs, product managers/marketers, and other business practitioners, Rodrigues teaches through intuitive examples from both web and offline environments. Avoiding math-heavy explanations, she guides you step by step through choosing the right techniques and algorithms for each application, running analyses in R, and getting answers you can trust. Develop core metrics and effective KPIs for user analytics in any web product Truly understand statistical inference, and the differences between correlation and causation Conduct more effective A/B tests Build intuitive predictive models to capture user behavior in products Use modern, quasi-experimental designs and statistical matching to tease out causal effects from observational data Improve response through uplift modeling and other sophisticated targeting methods Project business costs/subgroup population changes via advanced demographic projection Whatever your product or service, this guide can help you create precision-targeted marketing campaigns, improve consumer satisfaction and engagement, and grow revenue and profits. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

'Cult of Analytics' enables professionals to build an analytics driven culture into their business or organization, turning tried & tested tactics into an actionable plan to change their culture to one that uses web analytics on a day to day basis.