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If you want a solid introduction to analytics and what to look for, then I recommend Segment’s Analytics Academy. Lessons cover how to choose metrics, how to create a plan, what tools to use, and more. Google Analytics recently added a new tool, Calculated Metrics, which “are computed from existing metrics and drive more relevant analyses and enable greater actionability without leaving the product.”
Examples of Analytics
A lot of interesting information can be gleaned from analytics. Here are some examples and explanations:
- “A surprising map of every state’s (relative) favorite book” on The Washington Post
- “History As Big Data: 500 Years Of Book Images And Mapping Millions Of Books” on Forbes
- Book Lamp
- “Pages Crawled vs. Pages Indexed – An Important Ratio for SEO” on Digital Book World
- “Nielsen Summit Shows the Data Behind the Children’s Book Boom” on Publisher’s Weekly
- “Adobe Delivers Standardized Audience Metrics for Digital Publishing Industry” on What They Think?
- “App Annie Debuts E-book Sales Tracking, Analytics Service” on Publisher’s Weekly
- Jellybooks
- OCLC Experimental
- Jinni
- “Five Easy Answers to “What Are Customers Looking for in an eBook?”” on The Dallas Morning News
- “Forget Google Analytics, FullStory lets you ‘replay’ any visitor’s interaction with your website” on Venture Beat
- Freebase
- Gender Balance
- “Internet Archive’s virtual reading room empowers data mining on a societal scale” on Knight Foundation
- “MetaMetrics Partners With New Publishers to Provide Lexile Measures” on Digital Journal
- Notabilia
- “New Start-Up Touts Book Discovery Tool” on Publisher’s Weekly
- Stanford Literary Lab
- “Publishers Know You Didn’t Finish “The Goldfinch” — Here’s What That Means For The Future Of Books” on Buzzfeed
- “Q&A: Peter McCarthy on Use of Data, Consumer Insights and Efficiency in Digital Marketing” on Digital Book World
- “ALM: Measuring the Impact of Research” on PLOS One
- “Romance Ebook Sales Stats From Europe: Dominance and Submission” on Digital Book World
- “Scope and diffusion of Scottish presence in published record detailed in new report” on OCLC
- Sepublica
- “Scribd Lists Most Popular Books, Fastest Readers By Country” on Paste
- “Sony Reader Store Unveils Emotion Match Ups and Pre-orders” on GoodEreader
- “Spotify shares new data on how songs are becoming hits in the digital age” on Venture Beat
- TV News Archive
- “Vook Debuts Free E-book Sales Tracking Service” on Publisher’s Weekly
- “Using data to enable better experiences” on Brandwatch PeerIndex
- “The Best Social Media Analytics Tools for Publishers” on Adam Sherk
- “Take notes, Nate Silver! Reinventing literary criticism with computers” on Salon
- “What is Schema.org?“
- “What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong” on Time
- “What’s for Sale? Moving from Selling Content to Monetizing Attention” on The Scholarly Kitchen
- Data Liberate
- “WSJ: Amazon, Nook, Kobo Watch E-Book Readers and Learn” on Digital Book World
- “Your E-Book Is Reading You” on Wall Street Journal
- “Dangers of the “Google Analytics-powered Startup”” on PC Tech
- “Researching Reader Intent to Fine-Tune Book SEO” on Digital Book World
- “Announcing Student Satisfaction Analytics” on Udemy
- “Australia’s Tablo adds fee-based analytics for ‘authors who are serious’” on The Book Seller
- “Employing Localized Data for Global Book Discovery” on Publishing Perspectives
- “Open Access: Nature Publishing Group Publicly Releases Findings From Author Insights Survey” on Library Journal
- “Authorgraph Big Data Illuminates Trends in Digital Publishing” on Linebaugh Library Teaching
- “What Code Is Revealing About Readers” on Digital Book World
- “Statistics: New Study Measures Digital Natives in Every Country” on Library Journal
- “Reader Analytics: Not All Authors Want To Know” on Porter Anderson
- “How Big Data Helps Us Deal with More and More Books” on Publishing Perspectives
- “If You Sell the Book, Will They Read It?” on Digital Book World
- “Is Google Books Leading Researchers Astray?” on Slate
- “Can analytics on reader behavior improve publishing?” on Digitopoly
Tools
If you want to dive in, here is a list of tools you can start checking out. Also, keep in mind that book metadata is important, and managing metadata well can go a long way, according to DBW’s “Homebrew Systems: How to Be More Efficient in Your Metadata Management“:
Automation
After collecting data, you can use the information to your advantage and even automate some of your marketing strategies. The most obvious data to collect is target audience information. DBW’s “Why Authors and Publishers Should Embrace Automation” explains that having more automated processes frees up your time to optimize your strategy and make the marketing more effective.
One easy way to automate is to create a list of emails to send out to readers or subscribers of your newsletter. Personally I use Mailchimp’s Automation. One workflow I have set up is to send students of my Udemy course sample files and additional information to help them self-publish. I’m also setting up a blog drip that will give subscribers to my newsletter more tools and guides for various aspects of publishing.
What kind of data do you track? Have you used it to automate your workflow? If so, please share in the comments!
This post was originally published on December 14, 2015.