If you want to understand and get true value from your online content you need to understand how it is used by your customers. If you work with web analytics and online search optimization, this book will provide you with the tools and insight you need to do just that. Even more, it will give you an actionable plan to transform the culture of your organization into one that uses web analytics on a daily basis, focusing on real changes you can make to your department and processes to transform the way your business works. With examples from dozens of companies ranging from small businesses, to consumer sites like Amazon, to some of the largest companies in the world including Tesco and Google, Cult of Analytics demonstrates just how to apply web analytics to your business.

Cult of Analytics enables professionals to build an analytics driven culture into their business or organization. Marketers will learn how to turn tried and tested tactics into an actionable plan to change their culture to one that uses web analytics on a day to day basis. Through use of the fictitious ACME PLC case, Steve Jackson provides working examples based on real life situations from the various companies he has worked with, such as Nokia, KONE, Rovio, Amazon, Expert, IKEA, Vodafone, and EMC. These examples will give the reader practical techniques for their own business regardless of size or situation making Cult of Analytics a must have for any would-be digital marketer. This new edition has been thoroughly updated, now including examples out of how to get the best from Google analytics, as well as ways to use social media data, big data, tag management and advanced persona segmentation to drive real value in your organisation. It's also been expanded to include exercises and new cases for students and tutors using the book as a text.

If you want to understand and get true value from your online content you need to understand how it is used by your customers. If you work with web analytics and online search optimization, this book will provide you with the tools and insight you need to do just that. Even more, it will give you an actionable plan to transform the culture of your organization into one that uses web analytics on a daily basis, focusing on real changes you can make to your department and processes to transform the way your business works. With examples from dozens of companies ranging from small businesses, to consumer sites like Amazon, to some of the largest companies in the world including Tesco and Google, Cult of Analytics demonstrates just how to apply web analytics to your business.

The Cult of Analytics enables professionals to build an analytics driven culture into their business or organization, turning tried and tested tactics into an actionable plan to change their culture to one that uses web analytics on a day to day basis.

“One of the most exciting developments from the world of ideas in decades, presented with panache by two frighteningly brilliant, endearingly unpretentious, and endlessly creative young scientists.” – Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature Our society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our lives: who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, and who we love. This year, the world will generate 5 zettabytes of data. (That’s a five with twenty-one zeros after it.) Big data is revolutionizing the sciences, transforming the humanities, and renegotiating the boundary between industry and the ivory tower. What is emerging is a new way of understanding our world, our past, and possibly, our future. In Uncharted, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel tell the story of how they tapped into this sea of information to create a new kind of telescope: a tool that, instead of uncovering the motions of distant stars, charts trends in human history across the centuries. By teaming up with Google, they were able to analyze the text of millions of books. The result was a new field of research and a scientific tool, the Google Ngram Viewer, so groundbreaking that its public release made the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, and so addictive that Mother Jones called it “the greatest timewaster in the history of the internet.” Using this scope, Aiden and Michel—and millions of users worldwide—are beginning to see answers to a dizzying array of once intractable questions. How quickly does technology spread? Do we talk less about God today? When did people start “having sex” instead of “making love”? At what age do the most famous people become famous? How fast does grammar change? Which writers had their works most effectively censored by the Nazis? When did the spelling “donut” start replacing the venerable “doughnut”? Can we predict the future of human history? Who is better known—Bill Clinton or the rutabaga? All over the world, new scopes are popping up, using big data to quantify the human experience at the grandest scales possible. Yet dangers lurk in this ocean of 1s and 0s—threats to privacy and the specter of ubiquitous government surveillance. Aiden and Michel take readers on a voyage through these uncharted waters.

"In Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris argue that the frontier for using data has shifted dramatically. Leading companies are doing more than just collecting and storing information in large quantities. They're now building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights that are, in turn, generating impressive business results. Their secret weapon? Analytics: sophisticated quantitative and statistical analysis and predictive modeling supported by data-savvy senior leaders and powerful information technology."--Jacket.

Message from the Author: "When I started out in web analytics I was a complete novice. I got into it purely by accident and because I was curious. My goal is to make web analysis as easy as humanly possible for the beginner. It's the system that I have used for decades to compliment natural curiosity when I notice something in the data. You'll learn how to start using data to produce information, how to ask the right questions of your data, how to become a serious asset in your company and have a repeatable field tested process to use in every analysis you do. The book is designed to give you a short cut to getting results from the noise you see in web analytics every day."