Product Description

In order to establish and then maintain a successful presence on the Web, designing a creative site is only half the battle. What good is an intricate Web infrastructure if you're unable to measure its effectiveness? That's why every business is desperate for feedback on their site's visitors: who are they? Why do they visit? What information or service is most valuable to them? Unfortunately, most common Web analytics software applications are long on functionality and short on documentation. Without clear guidance on how these applications should be integrated into the greater Web strategy, these often expensive investments go underused and underappreciated. Enter "Web Site Measurement Hacks", a guidebook that helps you understand your Web site visitors and how they contribute to your business's success. It helps organizations and individual operators alike make the most of their Web investment by providing tools, techniques, and strategies for measuring--and then improving--their site's usability, performance, and design. Among the many topics covered, you'll learn: definitions of commonly used terms, such as "key performance indicators" (KPIs); how to drive potential customers to action; how to gather crucial marketing and customer data; which features are useful and which are superfluous; and advanced techniques that senior Web site analysts use on a daily basis. By examining how real-world companies use analytics to their success, "Web Site Measurement Hacks" demonstrates how you, too, can accurately measure your Web site's overall effectiveness. Just as importantly, it bridges the gulf between the technical teams charged with maintaining your Web's infrastructure and the business teams charged with making management decisions. It's the technology companion that every site administrator needs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #382132 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 430 pages

From the Publisher
This convenient guidebook helps organizations and individual operators alike make the most of their Web investment by providing tools, techniques, and strategies for measuring their site's overall effectiveness. You'll learn the definitions of commonly used terms, how to gather crucial marketing data, how to drive potential customers to action, and more. It's the technology companion that every site operator needs.

About the Author
Eric Peterson has been working in Web analytics since 1998 in both a technical and a marketing capacity. Currently, he is an analyst at JupiterResearch, a well-respected analyst firm focusing exclusively on the Internet, covering analytics, search, content management systems and related application technology. In his short tenure at JupiterResearch, he has been quoted in a number of well-respected publications, including InternetRetailer, InfoWorld, The Deal, Ecommerce Guide, Datamation, MediaDaily News and Clickz. He regularly give Webinars on a number of site operations subjects including Web analytics, key performance indicators, search, usability and content management.

Customer Reviews

Useful introduction to the subject
Web site measurement seems to be all the rage at the moment. Look at the source code for just about any commercial web site that you visit and you'll find code that is there to grab as much information about you and your browsing habits and store it in the company's database. I spent some time last year putting code like that into every page of a client's web site.

So, it would seem to be the perfect time for Eric Peterson's new book. Like all of O'Reilly's "Hacks" series, it starts with the basics of its subject matter and in a series of a hundred small chunks of knowledge it introduces the reader to the topic in hand.

This time the topic in hand is how to measure how successful your web site is being. "How successful it's being at doing what?", you might ask. And that's a good question which is also covered in the book. You need to know what your web site is trying to achieve in order to be able to measure how well it is achieving it. It's a basic point, but one that is often missed.

That comes later in the book though. We start with an introduction to web measurement vocabularly. If you're unsure of the difference between hits, pages and visits, then the first chapter will soon get you up tp speed. It also talks about the different kinds of users that you will get and gives a good overview of the various technologies that can be used.

Whilst the book talks about a number of different companies that provide web measurement software, it also demonstrates that you don't necessarily need to spend all that money to get good results by creating a do-it-yourself web measurement application which is expanded and enhanced in each chapter. This application is obviously rather basic, but it should be viewed as a starting point which you can then add extra features to as your requirements grow and change.

All in all this is a very good introduction to an increasingly important sector of the web industry. It's therefore a shame that it was released at about the same time as Google released its Google Analytics product. Google Analytics will be an obvious first choice for many small companies first getting into web site measurement and unfortunately it isn't mentioned at all. Even Urchin, the product that Analytics is based on ony gets a couple of mentions. That's a pretty minor niggle though. It's still a book that's well worth reading if you're just getting started in web site measurement.