Web Analytics an hour a day: Introduction

Guys,

I am back!
I guess you are all expecting the review i promised in the last post. I am working as fast as i can, in case you are wondering what that lazy guy is doing all these time…:D

I have been thinking about how i should write review for such a comprehensive book “Web Analytics an Hour a day“. The way i read, what i remember and how i apply what i learn are definitely different than most of you because i am working as a SEM professional and many of you are not. I don’t really like programming or technical stuff yet i love data and doing data analysis.
I have been using various web analytics tools for a while, be responsible to put together tracking recommendation for clients, experience the frustrating when the data collected is not correct etc…
So yeah! my personal take is biased towards the geeky type 🙂

One day, it came to me that i should write different reviews for different types of audience of this blog, or for different personas. Let say we have the following personas for this blog:

  • The first one is a lady, of course 🙂 Her name is Sydney. She is 32, married with two kids: a boy and a gal. She works in the marketing department of a MNC, whose regional headquarter is in Singapore. Online marketing is kinda new to her. She’s started exploring about online marketing not long ago, just about 6 months. Most of the current “so called” online activities for her company are handled by the incumbent creative agency. Normally they put banner on Yahoo homepage or AsiaOne.

So coming to this blog, her main motivation is to find more information about online, what are the activities online etc… She wants to make sure that she understands enough about online to judge the performance of running campaigns, the competence of the incumbent agency or at least know how to justify to her manager the amount of money being spent online and the return.

For Sydney, she ‘s definitely not a technical person and web analytics is something brand new to her. However, she wants to know if it can help her in her daily work, or how it can help her to understand more about the company’s website.

  • The second person is a guy named Joey. He’s about 30, recently married. Previously, Joey worked in the IT department of a big company then moved to become a IT consultant. He has a very strong technical background and he wants to know more about Online Marketing from a practical, marketing perspective. He reads quite a lot about what’s happening in the US or UK, however it’s quite different from what’s happening in the region. That’s why he’s been following this blog, to know more about what’s happening in Singapore and the region.

As for Web Analytics, Joey understands a little bit about Tracking mostly from the time he managed the company’ website and read the web log. He used to read the web log but does not really understand how web analytics can be apply to marketing activities or how marketing folks have been using the data.

  • The third person is girl called Monica. She’s started doing online work since 2004. She started as a web designer, working for a big MNC, whose HQ is in Singapore. Subsequently she moved to the SEM department in the same company, doing a bit of Paid Search and a bit of Search Engine optimization.

Monica uses Google Analytics before and she understands that advertiser can derive ROI of their Paid Search campaign using Google Analytics. Her company used to employ another third party tool, however due to lack of training, she found the tool too complicated and confusing to use.

  • The fourth person is also a gal, Samantha. She knows about online marketing, has been working in the industry since 2003. She’s passionate about Web Analytics and uses Google Analytics + Omniture (at work) + Stats Counter (for her own website).

She heard about Avinash not long ago and started reading his blog. She’s wondering if the book “Web Analytics: an hour a day” is of any good and whether she should buy 1

  • The fifth person is a man called Kent. He holds a senior management role at a SEM agency. Kent lives in the UK and he’s doing some research about SEM industry/ Online industry in Singapore or SouthEast Asia.

Kent doesn’t do much of the ground work anymore. However, he’s keen to know more about new concepts/ideas on how to deliver more value to his clients. His firm is using internal tracking tool for most of the clients.
Kent has working knowledge of Omniture, WebTrends, HBX and Google Analytics

Okay, so there are five different personas and i will start writing reviews for each one of them.

The first one is for Sydney and it will be available on the next post.

(Really sorry guys, i am quite busy with a few different things. I will spend most of this weekend to work on this)

Cheers,
Chandler

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