Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

Practical advice from Eric and an amazing number of contributors (disclaimer: I contributed to one hack). A lot of best practices are represented here. Like other books in the Hacks series, this one is not philosophical, but gives you hands-on tools. If you're dealing with Web data, this is one of the best books on the subject.

The focus here is on measurement and reporting. If you're a marketer looking strictly for deep insights into consumer behavior, this is not the book. However you should still check this out .. it lays the solid foundation that you can build on.

And at 16 cents a hack, why wouldn't you? This book will pay for itself.

Web Site Measurement Hacks is the best book in the Web Analytics field. The book explains introductory topics as well as the most advanced ones in a chronological natural way. Subjects like what is web analytics, how to choose a vendor, how the technology works, and how to implement a web analytics program in your company are covered extensively.

Besides being well written and almost encompassing, it presents also the point of view of several of the Web Analytics' experts and vendors. Many of the Hacks are co-authored by big names, such as:

* Bob Page (Yahoo!)
* Bryan Eisenberg (Future Now)
* Jim Sterne (Target Marketing!)
* Jim Novo (Drilling Down Project)
* Jim MacIntyre (Visual Sciences)
* Jason Burby (ZAAZ)
* Brett Hurt (Coremetrics)
* Xavier Casanova (Fireclick)
* Jeff Seacrist (WebTrends)
* Akin Arikan (Sane Solutions)
* Jay McCarthy (WebSideStory)
* John Marshall (Clicktracks)
* ... and many more!

The index is very helpful and you find subjects very easily. The book is well organized and I refer back to it every time I have doubts. It works for me as a Web Analytics' Encyclopedia.

In addition to being well organized and well written, this book does an outstanding job of breaking a complex subject down into understandable pieces. Whether you are new to web analytics or have been using a web analytics tool for years, you will learn something from this book.

I highly recommend this book.

In the world of web analytics, most of the concepts are not necessarily super-complicated. However, there is a great deal of information for the practitioner to master.

In my experience this information is spread across a large cross-section of vendor's sites, blogs, user forums, web sites, etc. . .

Eric has done an excellent job of taking this information and compiling it in an easy to understand way.

In addition, he collaborated with nearly every major player in the web analytics industry. Because of the many contributors this book contains a breadth and depth that is rare.

From the basic web analytics terminology to the most complicated marketing analysis, the concepts are explained in a detailed and easy to access way.

Bottom Line:
If you are responsible for web analytics at any level you will benefit from this book.

I think that the book is for differente people: programmers and marketers. But I found it quite interesting althought you have to select what hacks are appropriate for your job.

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.

It has been a couple of years since I read this book, but I'm sure most of it is still relevant. It's definitely one of the first books you should get if you're interested in web analytics. It's one of those books you can go back to and use as a reference when you need valuable input.