Your Google® Game Plan for Success: Increasing Your Web Presence with Google AdWords, Analytics, and Website Optimizer

Chapter 12. Elementary Statistical Concepts

Using Google Website Optimizer opens the door for us to talk about the sub-industry within web analytics that deals with testing, experimentation, and multivariate analysis — a sub-industry, mind you, that is growing exponentially and rapidly making its way into department meetings and boardrooms across the globe. A few website owners today are starting to understand that if they do not run experiments on their websites, landing pages, and marketing initiatives, they are setting themselves up for failure. No longer can you get away with a website that is not touched for years and ads that run unattended on Google for months at a time. (Could you ever have gotten away with it in the first place?)

This small subset of website owners who "get it" know that testing in general, and using tools like Google Website Optimizer in particular, are the keys to victory over their competition. They're also getting that the statistics you saw in the previous chapter use elements from beginning statistics courses taught at colleges and universities all over the world. To take it a step further, the entire package of data in Google Analytics is a statistics package, and so are most of the metrics you see in Google AdWords. Needless to say, having some knowledge of elementary statistics will help you greatly in your quest for success.

In this chapter I'll discuss some of the basic statistical concepts that are covered in an elementary statistics class, and ...