Google Analytics

The book I read to research this post was Google Analytics For Beginners by SSRG Solutions which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. There is a fair amount of books on this topic but not as many as on some computing topics like Facebook Marketing which helps make it relevant. It is only around 40 pages so is quite short. Google Analytics if you don’t know is a free program that gives you statistics on things like number of visitors and page views for your website or blog. They give you a bit of code to paste into your website which has to have cookies and HTML enabled. The bit of code literally is a cookie which excludes it from many high end where there is a need for more security and this option is frequently disabled. Google Analytics which came about when Google purchased Urchin which was a paid program although more than capable. It gives you information like which posts are more popular, unique visitors to your site, what keywords were used etc. There are more high end analytical programs available but they tend to be very expensive. Many blogs use Google Analytics by default and if you self host a WordPress site you can use it with that. It can also be used with social media and also integrates with Google services like Adwords. It is particularly good for people who sell goods online and want to see the effects of different campaigns like blog posts on a product. In this regard Adwords is particularly effective because you can see which search terms are most effective and also how much you can afford to spend in purchasing these. Google operates a bidding process for these often with a cap limit on total sales you are willing to purchase. I think it is a must have if you are a small to medium sized business. I did enjoy this book and would recommend it mainly for people who don’t know much about it. It’s simple to understand but powerusers might want a more complex and lengthy book.

Data Science

The book I read to research this post was A Simple Introduction To Data Science by Lars Nielsen et al which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is only short around 50 pages and is just an introduction to this subject. In the near future there is going to be a huge shortage in data scientists and data analysts. At the same time there is 1.9 zetabytes of data being produced on the internet by the end of 2011 with 95 % being less than 2 years old. In fact from 2009 to 2030 this data is set to grow by 44 times. To remain competitive companies have to analyze this data as it pertains to them. In the health field in particular there are set to be big discoveries made thanks to this big data as they call it being analyzed. There are open source like R which will analyze it but tend to be difficult to use or commercial products like SAS & SASS which typically charge high fees and are cloud computing products. Many companies use the Amazon products which work with Hadoop and Map Reduce. Much of the data comes from social media sites especially Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin which if you are wondering why membership is free, that is why. They charge fees to companies to analyze the data on their sites. Storing all this data is going to be relatively easy but the biggests challenge is going to be finding particular information quickly among all this huge amount of stored data. I did quite enjoy this book and noticed Lars has done a couple of books on a similar theme which I might check out. I do recommend this book.