Analytics are a very hot topic today, and the term analytics itself was initially applied to Web measurement. If you have a web site and no analytics you are walking into absolute dark. In this post I suggest three great books on Business Analytics.

Before entering the subject, let me show you an interesting chart that compares (Google Trends) “Analytic” to “Business Intelligence”:

As you see analytics is really becoming hot. Is analytics part of BI? If not, is BI losing space to Analytics? You can read more on this interesting post, but it doesn't matter: both are quantitative techniques that help us to manage our business in a rational way. Both are the scope if this blog.

Now, back to Web Analytics, Eric T. Peterson a recognized specialist of those techniques. His first book

“Web Analytics Demystified” shows exactly what you shall measure and why. For each measure Eric explains computation and interpretation. You can freely download the book from this page.

I counted 76 measures: surely more that what you need but less than the what of other books cover. And this is the big advantage of Eric books: focus on effectiveness! The measures he presents cover almost any need but are not redundant or useless. You will probably need only a small part of them.

Measures are also so well organized and described so that you can immediately define your own subset (measures definition fits exactly KPIStudio template) and start collecting data.

Despite the fact that Google Analytics is currently the dominating web analytics application (maybe cause it's free), you will soon perceive that Google Analytics can't provide all data you need. The first reason is that Google hides from you certain detail (like IP or event data) by policy. The second reason is that Google doesn't know the data that you manage, like campaign cost, customer information and so on.

Here comes his second book “Web Site Measurement Hacks”. It will give you precious tips and techniques to collect and organize the extra data you need. This one you shall buy!

And finally his most recent book: “The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators” that groups KPIs by different business types (On-line retailers, content sites...) giving recommended values in each case!

This book is also freely available here and, as a complement, you will also find an Excel spreadsheet to help to perform needed computations!

Thanks Eric!!!