Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions

This is an area of website analysis which is fast changing. The book is a great intro to the subject, but you will need to keep up to date with developments. Read alongside active use of Google analytics or competitor products its very useful.

This book presents an easy to understand overview of analytics as a whole. It is not a "how to" book on the latest analytics software. The authors forgo the typical pretense associated with this kind of "technical" material, presenting the information in a tone that makes analytics quite fun.

Actionable Web Analytics is one of the most useful books I own about web analytics, and I own quite a few. It isn't an introduction to web analytics -- for that I recommend Avinash Kaushik's  Web Analytics: An Hour a Day  -- but for practical application in a business environment large or small, this is a book you need to own. I may be needier than most; I own two copies.I've worked for small companies most of my life, some vanishingly small. Now I work for Microsoft. I'm more impressed by the similarities between companies large and small than their differences. Whatever their size, most companies have yet to fully exploit one of the most significant advantages offered by web analytics -- prioritizing their development projects.Monetization is simply assigning a dollar value to desirable site behaviors -- the things you want people to do on your site. It doesn't mean you'll earn that amount if someone does what you want them to do; it's an approximation of that behavior's value in achieving your goal. How you assign a value to a behavior is less important than consistency in your method. (Burby and Atkinson do provide details even if I don't.) The ultimate value of a monetization strategy is guidance where to invest your development resources.Everybody's hard pressed to choose what to prioritize for their next web development project. Investment is risk. Usually it comes down to the HiPPO's decision -- the Highest Paid Person in the Organization. Monetization is a method of managing risk by determining which projects are likely to pay higher returns on investment. It takes the decision out of the hands of the HiPPO and bases it upon data. Making data-driven decision is what web analytics is about. And, obviously, actionable web analytics is what this book is about. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

For someone new to analytics this one has not proven to be ideal. It is aimed more at the marketing end of the scale and doesn't concentrate as well as others on the "how to". Having said that it is an excellent business book, just not ideal for me

Very good for beginners that have a clue about what web analytics means, but have no idea from where to start.