Book review : Actionable Web Analytics

Actionable Web Analytics : Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions is a marketing book like Competing on Analytics. A lot of sentences to say simple things. Here there is even sometimes copy and pastes. Nevertheless, this kind of book are sometimes interesting. This one is to some extends.

At the first look, it focus on making your website worth the money. Defining some important KPI for your business, finding KPI which can be improved and how to improve them using testing. It’s for websites, but the underlying ideas could be used everywhere. For instance, there is a chapter on prioritizing, i.e. from a set of thing to do how to find the first thing to do. This content could be used anywhere.

The book lacks on some important details. They never explain really how to instrument the website. They talk about page tagging, but never explain how this work. I think that understanding what you can get (and how) is important. There is also a lack of details on statistic significance. They write on it, but don’t explain the maths. How many page view do you need to be sure that page A is better than a page B?

Therefore, the book is no enough to apply directly to your website. You need to think first (not bad) or call the authors company ZaaZ . What is interesting is that their website is not really good.