Finally after 18 months I am excited to announce that the book has been published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc and is now available from Amazon and other outlets . The book started shipping on March 17th (coincidentally my birthday!) and just made the SES New York conference. Lucky for me as it sold out on the first day thanks to Sharon Preiss of Mobile Libris for her promotional work there.

*if you are a book affiliate and would like to link directly to Amazon, please use this book link (ISBN: 978-0-470-25312-0).

Updated Dec 2008:

Who is the book aimed at?

Don’t be put off by the title! There are no maths and you do not need to be an analyst, statistician or engineer – I am not any of these.

The book is aimed at a broad audience – essentially anyone with an interest in making their web site successful. That includes website owners, marketers, web designers, developers, content creators, PR departments and all the various intermediaries. It’s about measuring for success (the title of the first section) and applies best practice techniques on how to do so using Google Analytics.

There are of course some technical areas where a strong understanding of HTML and JavaScript are required. However, if that does not describe you, read that content to understand the principals involved, skip the code examples, and pass to your web developer team to get the details implemented.

Why do this? Because it puts you in control of your website measurement – something that very often is lacking when marketers try to communicate with IT…

OK, so give me some details on the content…

Spanning over 353 pages across 11 chapters, the content of the book is written entirely for the latest Google Analytics tracking code (ga.js) and is split into four key sections:

    • Part I – Measuring Success, is an overview of why understanding your web traffic is important to your business and covers different data collection methodologies (page tags and log analysers), data accuracy considerations and where exactly Google Analytics fits in.

 

    • Part II – Using Google Analytics Reports, explains how to navigate and use the Google Analytics interface and includes 10 Top reports to whet your appetite and begin the analysis of your website.

 

    • Part III – Implementing Google Analytics, is the best practice installation and configuration guide detailing how to track all online marketing channels, Flash events, banners, file downloads and more. There is also an advanced section entitled Google Analytics Hacks featuring implementation techniques not documented elsewhere.

 

  • Part IV – Using Visitor Data to Drive Website Improvement, is the largest section of the book. It describes how to build a culture of measurement in your organisation from objectives and key results, to key performance indicators. This is followed by a chapter dedicated to real-world tasks that covers optimising checkout systems, pay-per-click campaigns (including AdWords), SEO, and e-mail marketing efforts. There is also an introduction to multi variate testing.

Downloads

You can download the Table of Contents , Chapter 1 and the book Index from here or order directly from Wiley (US and Canada only) or Amazon.com . If you use a different Amazon country, simply edit the .com part of the domain from the link accordingly.

Have you read the book?

If you have already had a chance to read the book, please share your own perspective via comments below. I would be deeply appreciative if you could consider writing a review for the book on Amazon. Books like this live and die by their Amazon reviews and I am prepared to take the risk – I hope I don’t regret saying that!

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