should you accept this mission

I have wanted to keep this post to myself since I read the first 20 pages of an excellent book. You know, when you are a consultant like me, a one-man operation, you invest a lot of time, heck! all your waking hours, on either working, or teaching yourself new skills. It is quite hard not to believe that what you know, and others don’t, is what puts food on the table.

Akin Arikan has published what I believe the most important book in the Web Analytics field in the last 2 years (or since Eric Peterson published his Hacks). In fact, I think it’s an important book particularly because it goes further than Web Analytics; because it shows where us web analysts will need to be in a couple of year. To tell the truth, I have been acquiring several new skills in the last 18 months, strongly believing that, before long, mastering “pure” web analytics would not be enough to grow my practice.

I had been waiting for Akin’s book for a long time, without even knowing him and that he was working on it. In his incredible Multichannel Marketing, Akin lays down in very practical terms (and with a lot of sound theoretical foundations) how, today, we can start bringing down silos in businesses and connect customer data. He shows us very concretely how we can analyze the impacts of marketing channels on each other, and how we can analyze their relative weights in marketing to customers. How we need to go from Web Analytics to Multichannel Analytics.

He shows us that multichannel analytics is far from being mission impossible.

Reading his book felt as if that guy knew exactly what I needed to learn and master for the coming years. A real development program!

You understand now why I wanted to keep it to myself. I almost wish I was the only person who knew. But after my second reading, I had to share it with you. To tell you that this is a very difficult and essential task, but necessary if you work anywhere near marketing.

However, it’s up to you to accept this challenge, this new mission. Of course, in the event you get caught by a stubborn boss, I will deny having anything to do with it.

Quick! Close your browser.

This post will destroy itself in 30 seconds…

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Jacques Warren on August 30th 2008 in Database Marketing, Business Intelligence, Web Analytics

2 Responses to “should you accept this mission”

  1. Akin Arikan responded on 02 Sep 2008 at 11:30 pm #

    So glad I caught this post before it self destructed! 8-)

    Thanks very much for the kind words about the Multichannel Marketing book. It is very gratifying to find like minded colleagues in our field such as yourself.

    There really is something to be said that we web analysts need to get more around. We need to absorb some of the methods that have been developed elsewhere in marketing.

    You know, the other day it dawned on me that our “great discovery” of best practices such as KPIs is not actually an innovation. On second thought, it isn’t a revelation to be proud of, but shows how disconnected from the business we were.

    * We had to be told that the stuff we analyze should express whether the business is accomplishing its goals or not.

    * We had to be told to express things in terms of business value and not clicks and views and yada yada.

    WELL DOH!!!! If we had put ourselves in the shoes of the business leadership earlier, this kind of stuff should have been obvious to us much earlier. But it took our best and brightest to wake us up from our sweet dreams in “clickland”. I was no different.

    I think the multichannel stuff is in a similar category. But mind you, the colleagues on the offline side are just as much to be blamed this time. They too have a lot they can learn from working together with us from the online side.

    Thanks so much for the review and generous praise again! Please keep all of us posted when we fall asleep again and don’t see the forrest for the trees.

    Akin

  2. Jacques Warren responded on 03 Sep 2008 at 3:27 pm #

    Hi Akin,

    Well, thank you for reading The Big Integration!

    You are absolutely right; I have been bored for sooo long by analyzing anonymous traffic. We got to focus on outputs; hasn’t it been exactly what businesses have been doing forever? How can we report on anything else but business success (or failure)?

    Thank you again so much for your extremely valuable contribution to the field.

    P.S. You look good on my new t-shirt.

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