Diary of a Website: the Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics

This week, we've seen how to find your analytics information, how to read the Site Usage information, and how to understand Traffic Sources. While there's lots more to learn about analytics (and I write about it a lot at this blog), it can be overwhelming to try to look at and learn from everything at once.

While you're at the Traffic Sources section of your dashboard, though, check out the keywords. Click on that link for a full explanation of how to interpret the information, and learn also how to use keyword data to build SEO strategy by clicking on the link just to the left here.

There are a few other things that beginners need to know about Google Analytics:

• If you've been using some other site meter, the numbers won't match. I've noticed, for example, that numbers from e-commerce catalog sites are far higher than those from Google Analytics. I've spent plenty of time trying to calculate the correspondence, and I have to say it's a waste of effort. Just pick one source of information and notice the changes in the data from that one.
• Filter yourself out of your analytics, or have your webmaster do this for you. Go to What Is My IP Address? using your usual computer, note down the number it shows you, and ask your webmaster to filter you out. Otherwise your own visits to the website will show up and confuse your data. It's also a good plan to have people who work on your website filtered out. Baby Smart Travel had a day when Shan and I were conferring about how to do their contact form and between us we racked up 21 visits to the page. Visit... think... discuss... visit... think... go change something... discuss... Just tell Analytics not to count visits from all the computers that go to your site to work rather than as customers.
• Watch for changes. Once you have enough data to see what's normal for your site, look for the things that are surprising -- that's where you're likely to find great new ideas for bringing people to visit you.