HN Explorer

Ask HN: I'm looking to get started in Analytics; recommendations?

18 points by ricosroughnecks ↗ HN
As the title says, I've suddenly been bitten by the analytics bug (tracking, goal meeting, and general crunching of data). However, I have no idea where to start. Can anyone in the field, or otherwise, recommend any books, sites, etc? Do forgive if this is vague, as without any prior studying, I'm not even sure if I'm asking the proper questions.

P.S. It's 10:30am on this side o' the world, and I'm heading to work, so I may not be able to respond to any questions for the next 9 hours.

7 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] thread
patio11
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

People I trust have told me his books are great reads.

I'm self-taught on analytics and blog about it, but it is probably scattered over the last couple of years of posts. I wouldn't recommend it for an entry to the discipline.

michaelhans
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321

Depending on your project scope I really enjoyed 'Programming Collective Intelligence' by Toby Segaran. Some of the web API samples may be out of date at this point but I don't consider that a deal breaker if you can find it used cheap.

limedaring
I'd also recommend jumping head first and start looking at analytic solutions while going through blogs and books. I'm assuming you have a website already that you want to start crunching data from — beyond the obvious analytics.google.com, I'd recommend:

http://www.clicktale.com/ (watch actual browsing behavior/generates heatmaps)

http://www.crazyegg.com/ (another heatmap generator)

http://ethnio.com/ (less about analytics but usability is good too — this helps recruit users for usability testing straight from your website).

http://www.kampyle.com/ (get feedback from your users from a little widget).

http://www.kissmetrics.com/ (track and optimize conversion funnels)

http://mixpanel.com/ (more of a general analytics solution)

You don't have to use all of these solutions, but start playing around with some and pulling in data.