If any of you don’t read Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor, add it to your RSS reader now. But I have an even better idea for you—buy his book, Web Analytics an Hour a Day
I have to tell you that, while I like reading Avinash’s blog, I knew that his book was for a more general audience, so I didn’t expect to learn a whole lot. I thought that I’d be reviewing it mostly to recommend it to my readers, but I found a number of nuggets that were new to me.
The biggest thing that became clear to me is that I have given short shrift to qualitative analytics. I am a big fan of quantitative analysis, and I refer to it often, but Avinash is very persuasive about getting to the “why” behind the numbers. So, it’s not enough to know what customers did if you don’t know why. I think I’ve glossed over that a bit and maybe that’s been a mistake. I’ve always said that if you keep tweaking your site and looking at what customers do (quantitative) then you’ll eventually lurch into the right answer without ever knowing why. Avainsh is showing me that there are simple survey-based approaches and other approaches that give you more information on which to base your site changes, getting you to the right answer faster.
Avinash does his usual stellar job on demystifying Web metrics, championing less-popular but very effective measurements such as bounce rate, while helping folks to see why we should pay less attention to some popular metrics. A lot of my writing is directed at marketers so that they understand why it’s important to take the direct marketing approach when on the Web. Avinash takes things one level deeper so that your analysts can stop sending you reports and start answering your business questions.
If you’re serious about data-driven marketing, you must read this book. Avinash explains practical implementations that lead the way to taking action to improve your marketing. I can’t recommend Web Analytics an Hour a Day
