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Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business
 
 
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Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business [Paperback]

Eric T. Peterson (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

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Book Description

0596009887 978-0596009885 August 26, 2005 First Edition

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
  • 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.


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Editorial Reviews

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.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 432 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; First Edition edition (August 26, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0596009887
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596009885
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,856 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Like a conversation with a mentor, October 23, 2005
This review is from: Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business (Paperback)
No matter which page I read in this book, I always felt like I was a student in the area of web site statistics and had been afforded the privilege of speaking one on one with someone who really knows their stuff. Unlike other Hacks books I've read, in this text, all the sections flow together, redefining "Hack" as sub-topics of the current sections primary focus. Although you are expected to have a basic understanding of the underlying technology, the author writes in a very easy to follow, natural language fashion that neither dumbs the topics down nor makes the reader skip ahead passed fluff. In fact, there is a refreshing lack of sidebar or call-out sections, author's useless opinion about the weather in Albuquerque, or paragraphs dedicated to promoting some commercial product. Which leads me to another positive point about this book; any topic presented that requires a third party application to demonstrate with - uses freeware products readily available and without hitches.

After spending a few pages explaining what networking traffic tools are appropriate for web site visit tracking and which are appropriate for internal network traffic monitoring, the reader is then introduced to what is / is not appropriate data to monitor, and why. Once a foundation has been laid, time is spent reviewing the different mechanism of gathering usage statistics from your web site, including the web server's intrinsic logging, cookies, Macromedia Flash Local Shared Objects, RSS, JavaScript page tags, and Web Bugs. This book considers the last two to be the primary data gathering engine and are well covered, from general flow and browser trends, to implementing the code and ensuring you have a good privacy policy posted. The bulk of the book is then dedicated in showing you how you you can implement these tools into your web site, RSS feed, and emails to best gather real-time user environmental settings, dynamically display information or reconfigure your presentation based on said settings, and learn if parts of your presentation need to be reworked.

There is no end of good information in this book for anyone who wishes to learn the basics & intermediates of web site usage measurements. An abundance of code examples and plain-English presentation ensure that you understand the material and are never lost due to overly complicated presentations of concepts, or put-off by over simplifications. The author has brought an abundance of real-world experience into this text and it shows.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Getting The Most Out Of Your Web Site, October 19, 2005
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This review is from: Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business (Paperback)
In order to keep a web site going, not only do you have to have a great portal for users to view and buy the service you are providing, you also need a way to determine WHO is going to your site. Without the proper tools and analysis, you are stumbling in the dark while plays darts, only occasionally hitting a bullseye, usually just by pure chance.

With Eric Peterson's 'Web Site Measurement Hacks', you can maximize not only how you interpret the data you retrieve from visitors, but how to get more users to come to your site and why they are doing so. Chock full of 100 hacks (I would rather call them suggestions), the author uses his 10+ years of vast experience in web statistical analysis to provide a highly educational book that would be useful for anyone that needs to work with web traffic data.

This is a very useful guide for the following individuals:

Engineer concerned with harvesting of web traffic data for reporting purposes

Any marketing individual that is concerned with their online presence (that should be nearly everyone in the field)

Web analyst whose job is to sift through web data and track where business is coming from

Most of O'Reilly's "Hacks" books are very helpful that provide lots of great information and this guide is no exception.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Overall OK, but a lot of typos, and repetition, September 7, 2006
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This review is from: Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business (Paperback)
I personally disagree with the use of "Hacks" in the title - as less than 10% of the hacks in the book are truly hacks. In anycase, it's a decent book to learn about the technicalities of web "measurement" - but I found it really repeated itself a lot. Granted a lot of the KPIs are different for different types of sites - it could of been arranged better. It felt like I read the same thing 10 times, with only minor differences. (Could of been shown in a table maybe).

The perl code could of been put all together under a section called "create your own analytics program" instead of breaking it up into parts.

The index was incomplete - many abbreviations were not there. Towards the end of the book, the hack cross-references disappeared and abbreviations and other terms just popped up without explanation. This is where the incomplete index caused the most annoyance.

There were a LOT of typos - every 20 pages, there was a typo. Frustrating.

An appendix summarizing all the KPIs, terms, abbreviations, etc would of been of great use... as the index is incomplete, and there is no true table of contents - finding things with respect to "hack number" is tiresome.

But at such a cheap price - worth the money.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
total visits, buy process, total visitors, marketing data, technographic data, blank media, customer retention rate, new buyer, portable audio, home audio, shared object, last updated date, online retail model, using custom variables, multiple value events, web measurement tools, web server logfiles, one value event, entry page report, browser overlays, web site measurement, actual search queries, web analytics product, visitor segmentation, paid search keyword
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Online Marketing Measurement, Web Measurement Basics, Measuring Web Site Usability, Build Your Own Web Measurement Application, Tracking Application, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Excel, Buying Sessions, Zero Results, Use the Entry, Use Cross-Sell Data, Measure Content Syndicated, Key Conversion Rates, Measure Paid Search Engine Marketing, Use Language, Define Conversion Events, Fireclick Index, Percent Returning Visitors, Leo Schachter, Entry Page Visits, Percent of Visits Under, Understand Specific Group Activity, Deconstruct Time Spent, Document Object Model, Measure Your Mistakes
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