What do you think?
Rate this book
Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
"Web An Hour A Day" is the first book by an in-the-trenches practitioner of web analytics. It provides a unique insider's perspective of the challenges and opportunities that web analytics presents to each person who touches the Web in your organization. Rather than spamming you with metrics and definitions, Web An Hour A Day will enhance your mindset and teach you how to fish for yourself.Avinash Kaushik is a expert in web analytics and author of the top-rated blog Occam's Razor ( //www.kaushik.net/avinash). In this book, he goes beyond web analytics concepts and definitions to provide a step-by-step guide to implementing a successful web analytics strategy. His revolutionary approach to web analytics challenges prevalent thinking about the field and guides readers to a solution that will provide truly informed and actionable insights.In Part I, Avinash explains why traditional web analytics is dead and introduces the Trinity mindset and strategic approach for web analytics. He then details the data collection options at your disposal for robust analytics and the pros and cons of each methodology (such as clickstream, outcomes, research, and competitive data). He concludes Part I with a deep dive into qualitative data and its critical role in any web analytics program.In Part II, Avinash provides insights that will challenge your knowledge of what it takes to create a successful web analytics program. He covers customer centricity, optimal organizational structure, how to identify great analysts, and his (now famous) 10/90 rule of web analytics. From his experience, he outlines radical strategies for how you should select the right tool for your company (while saving money and peace of mind) and identify truly valuable metrics with his "three layers of So What?" test. He concludes Part II by providing a fresh perspective on some of the most common web analytics reports that you'll never look at in the same way again.In Part III, Avinash guides readers to a successful web analytics strategy and implementation month by month, day by day, and hour by hour. A customized quick-start guide for different businesses (including blogs) is followed by increasingly advanced and crucial analytics topics, such as search analytics (SEO, SEM/PPC and internal site search) and multi-channel marketing analytics. That's followed by the revelation of the key ingredients of a great experimentation and testing platform, performing competitive intelligence analysis, and Web 2.0 analytics.Avinash then discusses the three secrets behind making web analytics actionable and, in his clever, engaging, and thought-provoking style, debunks leading myths-about path analysis, conversion analysis, and real-time data, for example.Finally, Avinash highlights seven specific steps you can take to create a data-driven decision-making culture in your company and then discusses such advanced analytics concepts as statistical significance, SEM and PPC analysis, the power of segmentation, complex yet insightful pan-session metrics, and conversion rate best practices.Sprinkled throughout the book are real-world examples drawn from Avinash's experiences as an analytics professional at Intuit, DirecTV, Silicon Graphics Inc., and DHL.The book includes an innovative CD that includes more than five hours of insightful audio podcasts, a 45-minute video, PowerPoint presentations, and other useful web analytics resources. "Web An Hour a Day" is the ultimate resource for anyone needing a step-by-step, task-based guide to creating and maintaining a modern web analytics strategy and CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
480 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2007
56 people are currently reading
1800 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
March 7, 2010
A superb introduction to web analytics. This book has completely changed the way I look at this increasingly important part of my job as a web manager.
Kaushik writes well and is clearly very passionate about his work. All profits from the book go to charity!
Kaushik writes well and is clearly very passionate about his work. All profits from the book go to charity!
February 23, 2013
Forget page hits, unique visitors, and all the other sought after wed site statistics and find out how users are really using your site, what is working, and what is not. This was an eye opener for me. As manager of a large web site I thought I knew what I was doing using analytic software such as WebTrends and Google Analytics. I only had half the picture. I was focused on the wrong things.
Mr Kaushik is clearly enthusiastic about what he does. What could be dry reading is thoroughly enjoyable and I felt like I got to know him a bit on a personal level. His insight and theory is so spot on. I found myself constantly saying "that makes a lot of sense!" "Why didn't I see that before."
He brings real world experience with a lot of great insight and examples. If your business uses a web site then this is a MUST READ, regardless of your function in the company. This will change the way you look at the web forever.
Mr Kaushik is clearly enthusiastic about what he does. What could be dry reading is thoroughly enjoyable and I felt like I got to know him a bit on a personal level. His insight and theory is so spot on. I found myself constantly saying "that makes a lot of sense!" "Why didn't I see that before."
He brings real world experience with a lot of great insight and examples. If your business uses a web site then this is a MUST READ, regardless of your function in the company. This will change the way you look at the web forever.
October 13, 2018
Диджитал меняется так быстро, что актуальным в книге остаются вещи, имеющие больше отношения к маркетингу
December 11, 2009
What a great informative insight into the inner workings of the internet and how it can be used to further business relationships and increase revenue streams. This book is a must read for all the internet marketers out there, take your game to the next level. This book contains breakdowns of how and when to use web analytics to best fit your online operations. Very informative, highly recommended.
August 28, 2012
Don't waste your time you should go for the second web Analytics right away
Read
May 6, 2020Good Avinash is very aware on this topic
January 26, 2021
Keeping for reference. A great book to have on hand.
July 31, 2012
I wanted to like this book. The author seems jovial, the proceeds go to a good cause, and it seemed to harbor an iterative approach to understanding this topic.
That said, the book is CRAP. The author rambles on and on and on. I lose my train of thought. It is like he is high on caffeine and chatting out the side of his head. The table of contents seems to indicate some organization, but get in the weeds reading the pages and he flits all over the place.
The tone is pithy and shallow. "Call IT" when you have a problem. "Give a copy of this book to marketing and they will thank you." No, they won't thank me. If I ask for "business goals" they are going to ask *me* to tell me what those are. It should always be presumed that everyone else in the company is just as clueless as I am when it comes to this topic.
It it sloppy, disjointed, and just too fucking long a book to justify the time and effort to read it. It took me till 41% completion to surrender and admit this. You would be better served with a text like "Complete Web Monitoring." That book *will* take you months, it will get tedious, but I have enough context to trust the author and enough confidence to know that the 200 pages per topic is worth it in the end, with something actionable and easy to grasp. "Complete Web Monitoring" will also provide you with "Maturity Models" so you can assess where your organization is and what steps to potentially take next. With this book, I literally at times had no idea what report to generate, what questions to ask, when.
For me, all of this stuff in "Web Analytics" could have been laid out in 100 pages, then another 10-20 pages to schedule implementation. A tighter, get-to-the-fu**ing-point sort of text, in the line of "Up and Running" may have been much more agreeable. The author of "Web Analytics" seems to occasionally point to the 'Trinity Method.' Huh? --> that was some sh*t mentioned in Chapter 1 and just mentioned as if I could even remember what it was.
This feels like one of those "Agile" development shill book. No, I am not talking junk on "Agile" as a methodology, but some of the books just talk and talk and talk around the topics without actually telling you what the hell to *do*. It seems like a conspiracy theory to have this book end up in an overworked middle-manager's desk, let them get sufficiently interested enough to accept the ideas, but not enough time to actually wrap a head around them, then have the organization spend gazillions of dollars on consultant, or web analysts, or whoever. A scam....
For all these people talking about how great this book is, I have to seriously call into question if they are the ones actually doing the work of collecting/analyzing data. Maybe they called "IT" and got hooked up with some MS Excel dashboards that they wow C-Level executives with. This text is an incoherent mess of a book.
This book is a total waste of time. Save your money, get "Complete Web Monitoring" and call it a day.
That said, the book is CRAP. The author rambles on and on and on. I lose my train of thought. It is like he is high on caffeine and chatting out the side of his head. The table of contents seems to indicate some organization, but get in the weeds reading the pages and he flits all over the place.
The tone is pithy and shallow. "Call IT" when you have a problem. "Give a copy of this book to marketing and they will thank you." No, they won't thank me. If I ask for "business goals" they are going to ask *me* to tell me what those are. It should always be presumed that everyone else in the company is just as clueless as I am when it comes to this topic.
It it sloppy, disjointed, and just too fucking long a book to justify the time and effort to read it. It took me till 41% completion to surrender and admit this. You would be better served with a text like "Complete Web Monitoring." That book *will* take you months, it will get tedious, but I have enough context to trust the author and enough confidence to know that the 200 pages per topic is worth it in the end, with something actionable and easy to grasp. "Complete Web Monitoring" will also provide you with "Maturity Models" so you can assess where your organization is and what steps to potentially take next. With this book, I literally at times had no idea what report to generate, what questions to ask, when.
For me, all of this stuff in "Web Analytics" could have been laid out in 100 pages, then another 10-20 pages to schedule implementation. A tighter, get-to-the-fu**ing-point sort of text, in the line of "Up and Running" may have been much more agreeable. The author of "Web Analytics" seems to occasionally point to the 'Trinity Method.' Huh? --> that was some sh*t mentioned in Chapter 1 and just mentioned as if I could even remember what it was.
This feels like one of those "Agile" development shill book. No, I am not talking junk on "Agile" as a methodology, but some of the books just talk and talk and talk around the topics without actually telling you what the hell to *do*. It seems like a conspiracy theory to have this book end up in an overworked middle-manager's desk, let them get sufficiently interested enough to accept the ideas, but not enough time to actually wrap a head around them, then have the organization spend gazillions of dollars on consultant, or web analysts, or whoever. A scam....
For all these people talking about how great this book is, I have to seriously call into question if they are the ones actually doing the work of collecting/analyzing data. Maybe they called "IT" and got hooked up with some MS Excel dashboards that they wow C-Level executives with. This text is an incoherent mess of a book.
This book is a total waste of time. Save your money, get "Complete Web Monitoring" and call it a day.
March 16, 2017
This book, while some of it is super outdated, is also really helpful and motivating.
NOTE: This was published May 29th 2007, I read it in 2016/2017.
The tone of the book was perfect; It was professional with a splash of humor here and there. The humor really helped me to stay engaged in the reading.
The information itself is really helpful. Like I said above, some of it is outdated, but many, many times I found myself jumping on my computer to try something that the text suggested. There is a lot of really great insight in this book!
Some of the main topics and passages that really stuck with me include:
* Analysts must have a customer-centric view that enables them to think like customers.
* Customer-centric web design is key- you must shift from "the site visitor needs to do what I want them to do" to "the site visitor is doing whatever they wanted to do" and having success.
* Report creators and analysts are different- the ability to see the big picture is what an analyst does.
* Everything starts with objectives and desired outcomes; "Tell me your objectives and I'll tell you what insights I can provide with the data I have."
* The upward trend in user wariness with paid campaigns puts the focus back on SEO.
* Data will never tell you the why.
* A dashboard=1 single page, any long and that's a report.
* PPC can deliver visitors, but often it comes at a great cost and is suboptimal for building long-term relationships with customers... you are "renting" traffic.
* "In reality, a while bunch of traffic for most websites comes from the top 20 or so key phrases."- are you optimizing for those 20?
* The three greatest survey questions ever: 1) What is the purpose of your visit to our website today? 2) Were you able to complete your task today? 3) If you were NOT able to complete your task today, why not?
Tips I also loved included:
* The So-What Test: Ask every metric that your report on the question "So what? three times. If you don't get an answer by the third ask, you have the wrong metric.
* Check "PPP Campaign Cannibalization Rates" to make sure you aren't paying for traffic you already got organically in the past- test by going dark with PPC.
* Not every visitor is there to buy, so don't focus on single-goal or website travel funnels. That's not how people make decisions.
Useful links that really stood out to me:
* google.com/trends
* site:www.domain.com
* link:www.domain.com
Please keep in mind that these are only the lessons and URL's that really stood out to me. This book is full of hundreds of others.
I would highly recommended purchasing this book so you can highlight and add tabs to mark important pages that you want to go back to again later on!
NOTE: This was published May 29th 2007, I read it in 2016/2017.
The tone of the book was perfect; It was professional with a splash of humor here and there. The humor really helped me to stay engaged in the reading.
The information itself is really helpful. Like I said above, some of it is outdated, but many, many times I found myself jumping on my computer to try something that the text suggested. There is a lot of really great insight in this book!
Some of the main topics and passages that really stuck with me include:
* Analysts must have a customer-centric view that enables them to think like customers.
* Customer-centric web design is key- you must shift from "the site visitor needs to do what I want them to do" to "the site visitor is doing whatever they wanted to do" and having success.
* Report creators and analysts are different- the ability to see the big picture is what an analyst does.
* Everything starts with objectives and desired outcomes; "Tell me your objectives and I'll tell you what insights I can provide with the data I have."
* The upward trend in user wariness with paid campaigns puts the focus back on SEO.
* Data will never tell you the why.
* A dashboard=1 single page, any long and that's a report.
* PPC can deliver visitors, but often it comes at a great cost and is suboptimal for building long-term relationships with customers... you are "renting" traffic.
* "In reality, a while bunch of traffic for most websites comes from the top 20 or so key phrases."- are you optimizing for those 20?
* The three greatest survey questions ever: 1) What is the purpose of your visit to our website today? 2) Were you able to complete your task today? 3) If you were NOT able to complete your task today, why not?
Tips I also loved included:
* The So-What Test: Ask every metric that your report on the question "So what? three times. If you don't get an answer by the third ask, you have the wrong metric.
* Check "PPP Campaign Cannibalization Rates" to make sure you aren't paying for traffic you already got organically in the past- test by going dark with PPC.
* Not every visitor is there to buy, so don't focus on single-goal or website travel funnels. That's not how people make decisions.
Useful links that really stood out to me:
* google.com/trends
* site:www.domain.com
* link:www.domain.com
Please keep in mind that these are only the lessons and URL's that really stood out to me. This book is full of hundreds of others.
I would highly recommended purchasing this book so you can highlight and add tabs to mark important pages that you want to go back to again later on!
September 20, 2013
This book seemed a bit long to me. I think the concept of trying to break up this complex subject into smaller bits is a nice idea, but what it seemed to do in practice is to drag the book out more. I did get some good ideas and information from this book, though there were a lot of parts of the book that didn't apply to me. This book definitely assumes that you have greater control over the website you are trying to analyze and have at least some level of influence over the business (i.e. the whole chapter on hiring an analytics manager).
October 29, 2007
This is far and away the best analytics or SEM book I have ever read. Really incredible stuff by a guy who is smart and funny. This is accessible to anyone no matter what their level and is really, really outstanding.
August 14, 2013
A fairly comprehensive book on Web Analytics written in a very easy to understand manner. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to develop a good understanding of web analytics.
More details @
http://bookwormsrecos.blogspot.in/200...
More details @
http://bookwormsrecos.blogspot.in/200...
June 26, 2017
My rate is simple: don't stand the test of time. It's logical, it was written 10 years ago.
Spanish review about Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
Spanish review about Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
September 24, 2008
Essential reference for those of us engaged in the wild world of web analytics (and most of us are, whether we know it yet or not)
April 24, 2008
Excellent starting point for Internet professionals with limited knowledge and experience with web analytics.
November 20, 2009
A little dated, but a good overview of Web analytics and guidelines for how to get the most out of a Web site.
April 17, 2010
It is a little bit theoretical book with less practice. Even some subtle details given, its unnecessary high volume is something boring
August 2, 2010
Clear and passionate dissection of web analytics with a solid theoretical underpinning. Slightly repetitive in parts but it's worth it to get a handle on this important subject.
May 6, 2011
Great definition and an very actionable plan
December 30, 2013
This book has some great advice, but the time frame he says you can complete these projects are way off, especially for bigger companies with lots of politics
June 28, 2011
A simple question, "So what?" will change the way you look at web analytics.
June 30, 2013
Thorough guides to web analytics but hard to follow and too complicated to understand. Since the book was written in 2005, it doesn't provide up-to-date solutions.
Read
February 28, 2016Excellent book about creating insightful business reports and driving action. Not just about Web Analytics but also about Online Marketing in general. Definitely worth a read.
April 28, 2016
(relatively) Old but still lots of insights for someone interested in an approach to analytics
October 29, 2019
Essential reading for beginning web analytics.
January 20, 2012
my grandma is loving you
May 1, 2014
Simple
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews