Performance Marketing with Google Analytics product reviews

Performance marketing with Google Analytics is quite different to the last book on Google Analytics that I read - which focused on showing you 'how' to use Analytics without covering the 'why' in much detail. This book is different - the 'why' is everything - it's very much aimed at the marketer who may or may not have technical skills, and presents a compelling argument for thinking about Analytics data in a different way.

I love how this book sees the big picture - it even includes information on the politics of deploying Analytics into an organisation - why you should be extra careful with any assertions in the early days so the decision makers don't get a bad experience with some dodgy data - and how some people in the organisation don't want to have their performance metrics measured. I have had these frustrations dealing with corporates, where just because something is a good idea doesn't mean it will get approved from above.

The chapter on installing Analytics is solid. It's not just about copy-pasting some code into your template. If you want the good data out you need to make sure that there are funnels in place, site search tracking is enabled, you are tracking important PDF downloads, and you are making sure you add the Analytics code to newsletter / RSS / offline links, and more. When you use different software packages for different types of marketing, you need to plan to make sure the links have Analytics code attached so they can be measured, and you need to plan to explain all this to any staff or contractors that are involved in marketing. An proper installation of Google Analytics is in many ways an audit of your marketing mediums to make sure they are all contributing good data that can influence good business decisions. I like this way of looking at it.

Performance Marketing had plenty of additional snippets that I didn't know about. They recommend setting up 3 profiles per website so you have backups in case you mess up the settings (I never thought of that), and that the Analytics TOS requires you to include a privacy policy mentioning that Google Analytics is tracking visits anonymously (I wonder how many webmasters missed that one).

The explanations throughout the book are straightforward, and there are plenty of common-sense examples why you might like to enable a certain feature. There are plenty of screenshots of the various features that are discussed, and the book includes a good table listing all the standard reports and where they might (or might not) be useful.

I would recommend this book to marketers, business owners or web developers who operate very small to very large websites. There is plenty of 'big picture' information as well as the detail on the parts that matter, and certainly for me, Performance Marketing with Google Analytics offers an actionable way to improve website performance.