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Welcome to web analytics!

The purpose of this book is to provide a simple, focused introduction to web analytics, and Google Analytics specifically. It’s geared toward employees who may be working at a company or non-profit organization, for students at a university, or for self-paced learners. The approach is the same one that I’ve taken in most of my books, which is conversational, friendly, with an attempt at making things fun.

The experiment is to find a way to help people get started with digital marketing in a way that is fun and helps build skills—maybe through an internship, paid work, volunteer work, freelance work, or any other type of work. The focus is on skills and approaches that can be immediately useful to a business or non-profit organization. I’m not going to try to cover everything, but just the things that I think are the most helpful.

The other goal is to help you leave any intimidation you have in the dust. I used to be intimidated by marketing, and now look at me. I’m a marketing strategist and an assistant professor of marketing! But I remember the feeling of intimidation, so part of my approach is to encourage any reader who may feel uncertain about the field.

The fact is that web analytics has a lot of options, and there’s a lot of material out there. It can be overwhelming! But it can also be very doable, if you leave intimidation in the dust, take incremental steps, try things out, and build your confidence.

For example, I had a friend who used to be a journalist, and he was looking for new career opportunities. I helped get him started in digital marketing, and one of the first things he ran into was feeling overwhelmed by all the options, including all the articles about all the options. “There are so many tools out there!,” he used to say, “How am I ever going to learn all of them?!?”

The answer is that you don’t need to learn all of them. No one can. The thing to do is focus on trying some of the tools and skills and go on from there. I encouraged my friend not to worry about trying to learn everything, but instead to just learn some basics.

The friend worked with the basics, gained experience, and was able to find a local agency that gave him a shot at doing some freelance work. The career didn’t easily develop for him—he had to put effort into it. But a few years later, he’s doing full-time freelance work in digital marketing. He was able to leave intimidation in the dust, and I believe he’s also had some fun with it too.

LinkedIn showed digital/online marketing as a top skill that got people hired in 2013/2014, and web analytics is one of the core skills for online marketing—this includes being able to understand the performance of web sites and ad campaigns. Analytics is considered a part of business intelligence , which also figures prominently on the list:

Each year the way they refer to digital marketing seems to change, but since 2013, digital marketing (of which analytics is a core part) has been at the top. Demand will fluctuate over time, but we are talking about the top skills in any field that get people hired.

• 2014: https://blog.linkedin.com/2014/12/17/the-25-hottest-skills-that-got-people-hired-in-2014

• 2015: https://blog.linkedin.com/2016/01/12/the-25-skills-that-can-get-you-hired-in-2016

• 2016: https://blog.linkedin.com/2016/10/20/top-skills-2016-week-of-learning-linkedin

One of the other things I’ve seen in my career, which I try to reinforce in these books and in my classes, is the way that the core areas of digital marketing are related. For example, I consider web analytics to be tightly connected to all other areas in digital marketing. Content is key in digital marketing, as you’ll learn if you read my book Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (Apress, 2017), and advertising campaigns on search engines (AdWords) and social media take content and put it out there.

At the end of the day, you need analytics to measure the performance. That makes it super important.

This book mentions what I call the core areas of digital marketing: Content, AdWords, Social, and Analytics (CASA for short). My goal is to reinforce how all the areas are connected. AdWords is Google’s tool for creating ads for search engine marketing. The inspiration came from my professional background, as well as looking at trends in the marketplace.

Best wishes in learning web analytics and Google Analytics!