EightBlack.

I’m doing my best to concentrate and read every word of Avinash’s new book. The content is revolutionary. And in my mind, critical to future success on the web. If you’re serious that is.

Probably the other thing thats compounding my frustration this week is that we’ve got a team in Utah at the moment finishing our Omniture web analytics certification.

I’ve got analytics up the wazoo. My head hurts.

And to top it all off, Ben, our technical lead has got me all fired up about the new iPhone. Here’s a picture of us (taken with the iPhone) at a microbrewery in Salt Lake City. And its also proof that, despite what you may have heard about Utah being full of people who believe that alcohol is the work of the devil, it is possible to find (and consume) a decent beer.

Actually, would you believe the beer we’re drinking is actually called a “Polygamy Porter” and the tag line under the beer is “Why have just one…?”.

Indeed.

Back to my point of this post. One of the nuggets to come out of the first 20 pages of “An Hour A Day” is this question, “Why Does Your Website Exist?”

Think about it for a moment. Think long and hard. Can you answer this question? I reckon we’ve got clients who would argue for hours about this and still not be able to agree or come up with an answer. They’d then hire a Big 6 accounting firm to come in for 12 months and do a SWOT analysis. Or something like that.

I know why this blog exists.

But do you know why YOUR website exists?

And here’s the other gem.

“But no matter what tool you use, the best that all this data will help you understand is what happened. It cannot, no matter how much you torture the data, tell you why it happened”.

And thats why I think Avinash has hit one out of the park so to speak with his book. Most people focus on their raw website numbers. I know we have been guilty of this. And so have our clients.

But the message is clear. Knowing why something occurs on your site or why a customer does what he does is far more important than really knowing “the what”. And if you can combine the 2, then the intelligence is even more powerful.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 3:42 am and is filed under Analytics, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.