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HubSpot’s having a Marketing Library Sweepstakes, and we’re giving away a whole collection of the best marketing books, plus an iPad2! To teach you more about the books we’ve selected to include in our Sweepstakes, we’ll be doing a series of blog posts that contain reviews of the books, as well as interviews with some of the brilliant authors who wrote them!
One of the great marketing books included in our giveaway is Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity, by Avinash Kaushik. In this book, Kaushik expands upon the lessons in getting optimal use out of web technologies which he presents in his bestselling book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. His powerful argument for the importance of using data to transform your business takes the form of a simple guide to the best web analytics tools and methodologies.
We did a short Q&A with Kaushik to find out more about his book. Here are the answers to a few of our questions, straight from the author himself!
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What inspired you to write Web Analytics 2.0?
My first book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, was the first to combine the power of qualitative and quantitative analysis into one cohesive approach. Since its publication, digital marketing has become ever more social, we have an ever increasing number of ways in which we can collect qualitative feedback (online agile surveys, online usability testing, etc), there is an explosion of competitive intelligence available to us, and so much more power in the free/paid tools available to us. Those factors were the primary impetus in writing Web Analytics 2.0.
The book simplifies a complex world and provides specific recommendations, for businesses of all types, on how to be more data-driven.
Who would benefit most from reading your book? Why?
The book is deliberately written to be a non-technical; its primary aim is to help you adopt a specific mental model. Anyone involved in digital marketing efforts will benefit from the book. Analysts will find its recommendations on valuable metrics, customized reports, key data sources, and advanced analytical techniques to be valuable. Designers and UI folks will benefit from the strategies outlined to make quantitative data actionable. Marketers will benefit from specific guides on how to make email, social, paid search, SEO, etc. marketing efforts more accountable. Business owners will benefit from strategic concepts like measuring economic value, multi-channel attribution analysis, competitive intelligence analysis, etc.
In each case I follow this basic framework: Why should you care? What should you care about? How to go about solving the problem.
What would you say is the most important take-away from your book, and what makes it the most important?
If there is only one thing I could pick, it would be the computation of Economic Value of your digital existence. We make very, very poor decisions about the value of our inbound marketing efforts because we measure the wrong things, or insufficient right things.
Measuring Economic Value forces us to identify the Macro & Micro Conversions, which in turn can’t be done without a deep analysis of Objective and Goals, and no value can be assigned without an understanding of business impact.
You do this, and life as a “web person” will never be the same again. I promise.
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There you have it, a guarantee from bestselling author Avinash Kaushik that reading this book will change your business for the better. Enter our Marketing Library Sweepstakes for the chance to win Web Analytics 2.0, and many more!
How do you use web analytics? Is your business data-driven?
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