Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions - Softcover

Burby, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0470124741 ISBN 13: 9780470124741

Verlag: Sybex, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Knowing everything you can about each click to your Web site can help you make strategic decisions regarding your business. This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. The authors answer these critical questions―and many more―using their decade of experience in Web analytics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Burby is Chief Analytics and Optimization Officer for ZAAZ, Inc., a web design and analytics consulting firm. His clients have included eTrade, Ford, Sony, PayPal/eBay, Washington Mutual, Reuters, T-Mobile, Levi Strauss, and Microsoft.

Shane Atchison, co-founder and CEO of ZAAZ, Inc., leads its long-term strategic vision of helping companies realize the potential of the Internet and its impact on their business. Among his client list have been Converse, Sony, Ford, Microsoft, and National Geographic.

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Getting ROI from the Web Is Everyone's Job

Right now someone is clicking on your website, and knowing everything you can about those clicks and the people that make them is a business imperative. That's the first of a set of compelling business lessons distilled from the authors' decade of experience with the world's most powerful online brands. These lessons help executives, marketers, web managers, designers, and developers take action based on the actual behavior of site visitors.

This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. Inside you'll learn to demonstrate real ROI from your website.

• Learn to use web analytics data to help make strategic decisions and set corporate goals

• Ask the right questions when planning your website

• Recognize how your data reflects the perceptions of your customers, information on your competitors, and your marketing costs

• Develop criteria for choosing an agency to help you interpret your data

• Discover how successful your marketing efforts have been

• Create a culture of analysis within your organization

"Relationship marketing continues to evolve in new and exciting ways, and Actionable Web Analytics provides a clear and concise guidebook for the marketing executive. Burby and Atchison have captured the essence of creating relationships online, which lead to meaningful customer dialogues, and then measuring the success of those efforts."
―Lester Wunderman, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Wunderman

"We have been fortunate enough during the past decade to see our business grow in parallel with and in partnership with the team at ZAAZ. As true thought leaders in the web analytics and marketing space, Burby and Atchison have captured the important issues facing marketers and business people every day and explained them eloquently in Actionable Web Analytics."
―Josh James, CEO and Co-Founder, Omniture

"Burby and Atchison have spent close to a decade helping a wide variety of companies optimize their advertising spend, supersize their website value, and maximize their online marketing ROI. These guys are in an amazing position to help you figure out all of the above. But that's just the half of it. While their position is nice, their scary IQ, their awesome curiosity, and their uncanny ability to drill down to bona fide business value make this book a must read."
―Jim Sterne, President of the Web Analytics Association and Producer of Emetrics Summit

Right now someone is clicking on your website, and knowing everything you can about those clicks and the people that make them is a business imperative. That's the first of a set of compelling business lessons distilled from the authors' decade of experience with the world's most powerful online brands. These lessons help executives, marketers, web managers, designers, and developers take action based on the actual behavior of site visitors.

This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. Inside you'll learn to demonstrate real ROI from your website.

• Learn to use web analytics data to help make strategic decisions and set corporate goals

• Ask the right questions when planning your website

• Recognize how your data reflects the perceptions of your customers, information on your competitors, and your marketing costs

• Develop criteria for choosing an agency to help you interpret your data

• Discover how successful your marketing efforts have been

• Create a culture of analysis within your organization

"Relationship marketing continues to evolve in new and exciting ways, and Actionable Web Analytics provides a clear and concise guidebook for the marketing executive. Burby and Atchison have captured the essence of creating relationships online, which lead to meaningful customer dialogues, and then measuring the success of those efforts."
—Lester Wunderman, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Wunderman

"We have been fortunate enough during the past decade to see our business grow in parallel with and in partnership with the team at ZAAZ. As true thought leaders in the web analytics and marketing space, Burby and Atchison have captured the important issues facing marketers and business people every day and explained them eloquently in Actionable Web Analytics."
—Josh James, CEO and Co-Founder, Omniture

"Burby and Atchison have spent close to a decade helping a wide variety of companies optimize their advertising spend, supersize their website value, and maximize their online marketing ROI. These guys are in an amazing position to help you figure out all of the above. But that's just the half of it. While their position is nice, their scary IQ, their awesome curiosity, and their uncanny ability to drill down to bona fide business value make this book a must read."
—Jim Sterne, President of the Web Analytics Association and Producer of Emetrics Summit

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Actionable Web Analytics

Using Data to Make Smart Business DecisionsBy Jason Burby Shane Atchison Jim Sterne

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2007 Jason Burby
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-12474-1

Chapter One

The Big Picture

The Web has become one of the most powerful vehicles for marketing and communication ever created. It allows fast and easy communication with millions of customers in a timely fashion. It has transformed the speed at which companies and their brands can be created and grow. The Web has also created new opportunities for marketers to become better at their discipline. This chapter provides an overview of the changes in marketing that have resulted from the Web's existence and then a discussion of the key guiding principles you should remember for the rest of this book.

New Marketing Trends

"Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two-and only two-functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation create value; all the rest are costs." -Peter Drucker, 1977

According to Fortune magazine, the five largest American corporations in 1977 were Exxon, General Motors, Ford Motor, Texaco, and Mobil; Microsoft was a two-year-old startup venture, and the Internet had not even been invented. Yet, Peter Drucker saw the future clearly. He realized then something that is even truer now: Businesses must create customers, and the best way to do that is through marketing and innovation. The nature of "marketing" and "innovation" in 1977 were markedly different than they are today (or at least than they appear to be today), and the connections between business and customer were orderly, predictable, and easily managed.

The contemporary marketing executive faces unprecedented challenges and limitless opportunities. The distance between the business and the customer, both physically and emotionally, has been shortened to the duration of a single click. Those clicks, perhaps the most over-examined phenomenon of the last decade, are the staccato sound of a new engine of commerce and of the near instantaneous decisions made by customers to buy or not to buy. The marketer hears the clicks as a fanfare for success or a funereal march of doom. It may sound overly dramatic, but looking at the success of companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google shows that reality may be even more dramatic still.

The challenges inherent in navigating the world of business today are daunting, but the resources available are far more sophisticated than ever. The tools and tactics available now are probably an order of magnitude more powerful and more useful than they were five years ago. In the world of online commerce, marketing has become innovation. Innovation brings with it a new level of complexity as well as confusion, and marketers have to work harder and harder to stay ahead of their competitors and their customers.

Tools and tactics are essential, but strategy wins the war. Marketing leaders know that perspective and vision help create and drive a strategy. In the online world, it's often easy to become consumed with minutiae and forget the overarching business goals. Being able to show improvement in how many new clicks your site gets isn't useful if you can't show how much you invested to get those additional clicks and you have no baseline data for comparisons. Strategy dictates that metrics are grounded in historical context, and return on investment (ROI) is predicted before and reviewed after any program is implemented. Strategy must also lead to action, and action is the governing principle behind this book.

Marketing in the twenty-first century is about change and innovation. Change is no longer driven solely by the ideas of big companies ("let's introduce a diet version of that drink and see what happens") and their competitors. Now it's also driven by customer demands (and customer revolt). Information on good and bad products used to take months or years to become general knowledge. Today, new products are often discussed and dissected before they're even released. Change has come, and customers are doing innovation as fast as companies.

All of this change and innovation generates data-lots and lots of data. Data is the click made real. Data is the transformation of customer needs and buying decisions into marketing and innovation. Data is also the endless wave that threatens to overrun every marketing department in the world. Data is in danger of becoming the enemy of progress instead of the foundation of success. Throughout this book, we'll return to data and the specific actions you need to take to make that data valuable.

Before becoming completely consumed with data (and this book will show you exactly how not to be consumed by data), it's important to examine some of the larger trends that are driving the data onslaught. These trends are as follows:

The consumer revolution

The shift from offline to online marketing

Instant brand building (and destruction)

Rich media and infinite variety

We'll look at each one briefly and weave together the larger pattern of what marketing and innovation will look like in the near future. From that pattern, we'll set the stage for the "Analysis Mandate" and a plan for using the rest of Actionable Web Analytics. First, we go into the hearts and minds of the consumers.

The Consumer Revolution

Among the more than 100 million websites online (according to netcraft.com) and the billions of pages that form those sites is just the page you want. If you can find it, you'll click it. If you click it, you'll receive the satisfaction you so richly deserve. Welcome to infinite choice, Mr. and Ms. Consumer.

Most of us are familiar with the Industrial Revolution as part of a broad historical tableau that saw manual labor slowly replaced by automated labor and the manufacture of machines to power that automation. It was a significant revolution for businesses because productivity soared and costs dropped. For the worker, it was a time when their livelihood was often threatened by machinery; but they benefited from the cheaper and more readily available goods created by those machines. The revolution continued for many decades as each change produced a series of other changes, such as railways producing an infrastructure for wider distribution of manufactured goods and then allowing goods to be centrally manufactured as raw materials were transported. In many ways, the Industrial Revolution solidified the role of the consumer in the economy. Someone had to buy all the output from efficient and automated production, and thus the consumer class was born.

From the time of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the role of the consumer was pretty fixed. Consumers consumed the goods and services produced and distributed by industry. This was a sweeping and broad statement of how markets worked, and everyone accepted it as true. Consumers were, at least for the most part, passive participants in the ecosystem.

The Internet changed all that completely. The full extent of this change is still being observed and documented.

Consumer-Driven Choice

One of the authors recalls purchasing new stereo equipment in the late 1980s. Once the right receiver was chosen based on a review in a magazine, finding it...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sybex
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470124741
• ISBN 13: 9780470124741
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 290
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland