Wiser.org Blog

Avinash Kaushik has written an excellent book on how to use free and easy-to-use tools for measuring your website’s performance. Unlike other authors, who are fixated on site visit numbers, Kaushik wants you to develop a well rounded perspective that includes: the voice of your customers, why and how people are actually using your site, and how you are doing versus the competition. His approach will help you gain powerful insights.

If you are a communications manager or working on your non-profit’s IT team you should have a look at this book. If you can get past that it’s written for a business audience, and here and there talks about shopping carts and consumers, you will find it includes many actionable gems. Here are a couple of the key highlights:

• Don’t fixate on site visitation data like Google Analytics: Also listen to the voice of the customer, experiment and test your website, and conduct competitive intelligence to generate insights.
• Focus on the ‘Critical Few’ when measuring your success: What are the most important things your website is trying to solve? What three priorities are you executing against to have an impact? What is the one metric that you can identify that would let you know if your organization is going up in flames or not? Some examples might include: Task Completion Rate, Visitors Loyalty and Recency, and RSS/Feed Subscribers.
• Don’t forget the emerging Social, Mobile and Video Web: The web is evolving from one-way to two-way conversations that are powered by video, Ajax, and Flash, and distributed through multiple channels like RSS and mobile.
• Create a Data-Driven Culture: Give your decision-makers the gift of an answer – don’t overload them with data. Start with outcomes and impacts, not visits. Create heroes and role models by finding willing partners. Share the voice of the customer.

Finally, Kaushik shares his thoughts on how to set up a web analysis effort and how to make the data meaningful for your audience. Plus you get a DVD filled with videos and a $25 Google AdWords gift to start promoting your organization. As Seth Godin, author and web guru extraordinaire has said: “Analytics is vitally important, and no one (no one) explains it more elegantly, more simply, or more powerfully than Avinash Kaushik. Consider buying up all the copies of this book before your competition gets a copy.”

You can buy the book by clicking here: Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Tags: Book Review, NPTECH