Best marketing book for 2010?

My tip for the best book to help you with your marketing in 2010 isn't one of mine, or one on social media, although recommendations on this will follow soon since I have had a lot of questions about the best book on social media recently. Instead, my recommended book is on marketing analytics. Please recommend the books which you think will help marketers most across the whole of marketing to the comments. TIA!

The main audience for this book is arguably for web analytics specialists who will probably have already devoured the book and enjoyed the great chapter on careers advice. But I think there are gems for all involved in marketing in this book which will help you get the most out of your traditional or online marketing in 2010.

In fact, I think the book's title is much narrower than the content which covers many aspects of customer insight and business intelligence needed for effective marketing.

In my review I recommend the main sections which should help different types of marketer. Of course, there is a big overlap, between what will interest who and many will want to browse all, but I hope you find my pointers useful.

Marketing / Ecommerce Directors

To maximise returns from online channels, you have to select the right tools, to this end chapter 2 will help with 10 "must ask" questions for vendors of different systems. I would have like to have seen more discussion of the "free" vs paid option, i.e. Google (or Yahoo!) Analytics against Coremetrics, Omniture or Webtrends et al., but Avinashes position as Analytics Evangelist at Google prevents that I think.

That said, the majority of practical examples of improving performance from the book are from Google Analytics, so if you are using Google Analytics, you should buy it for your team to help them squeeze more out of your marketing budgets.

The final chapter on creating a data-driven culture is essential reading for senior marketers and business managers. If this is an issue for you, you will find my post on Amazon's Cult of Analytics an interesting read.

Marketing managers or campaign execs

For marketing managers, these chapters will be most useful:

• Chapter 5 on defining the right goals - "the critical few" relevant for your type of business - Avinash discussed non Ecommerce B2B and publishing business models too. He also shows the types of goals you should setup in Google Analytics - many of these aren't configured in businesses I talk to.
• Chapter 6 on leveraging qualitative data - researching customers needs and wants via the web and most importantly finding the gap between what they want and what your website offers.
• Chapter 7 will help you decide the type of experimentation - AB and multivariate testing you should be considering.

For campaign managers I recommend:

• Chapter 8 on competitive intelligence analysis which includes website traffic source analysis with an emphasis on assessing your search performance is also important
• Chapter 9 on social media and video will be a must read with a good selection of the best tools for measuring these.
• Chapter 12 on multi-touch campaign attribution and multichannel analytics are a state of the art review of what I see as the two biggest challenges of managing online customer acquisition effectively.

Content owners, product managers or conversion specialists

If your job involves generating more leads or selling more product via site, you will want to go through most of the book - particularly Chapter 7 on AB/MVT. The many practical chapters describing specific measures and reports you should analyse to get the most from Google Analytics will help you look good to colleagues by finding the quick wins and not so obvious challenges. For this I recommend

• Chapter 3 on Clickstream metrics
• Chapter 4 on Clickstream analysis
• Chapter 7 on AB/MVT

What could be improved?

Well very little really! I'm envious of the incredibly engaging style that Avinash uses which should really help build up enthusiasm about what some would see as a dry topic. It's a shame my textbooks don't lend themselves to this...

Although I have been unstinting in my praises of this book, there are weaknesses in the structure IMO - I found it hard to navigate between some chapters which would be better if task based - limited to marketing activities such as growing traffic, engaging first time visitors, improving loyalty, etc. Tips and Techniques to improve these areas are scattered across several chapters possibly because they are sourced from different original blog posts, which cause the reader to work a little harder.

For example, Chapter 4 is titled "The Awesome world of clickstream analysis: practical solutions". Certainly an engaging title, but it's actually got some of the best content on campaign analysis if you look carefully.

Likewise the title Chapter 12 Advanced Principles for Becoming an Analysis Ninja actually hides what I think is the best review of measuring and integrating offline communications with online web response and determining value from the mix of referrers in a campaigns.

Finally, although this is a fantastic primer there are other practical books which should also be in your toolkit, particularly if your involved with configuring Google Analytics or landing page optimisation. See my review of 3 essential conversion optimization books for the relevant books by Brian Clifton, Bryan Eisenberg and Tim Ash.