Today I was invited to join BEM Interactive’s March Madness Google Analytics event. It was a great overview of Google Analytics that I used as a refresher since it had been 2+ years since I had taken any real time to mess with GA. However I also come away with some high level tips from BEM’s GA Ninja Jeremy Shaffer. This guy really knows his stuff and can speak to a crowd very well… something I am still trying to master So without further adieu I would like to share you with what I took away from today.

1. Without a good foundation IE. hosting/website design analytics won’t do you a bit of good. Analytics are meant to help you streamline and custom tailer a site for a visitor, not fix a broken site.
2. You will not magically gain traffic by installing analytics. It takes a full market strategy to drive traffic and analytics can quantify if a strategy will or has worked.
3. Just running reports showing numbers will not get you anywhere. You need to be qualifying questions instead. How can analytics tell me I sold a product from this campaign for example.
4. Define conversions for your site. Having traffic is cool but at what point in your site do you deem their visit valuable? Is it when they click order now? When they visit your careers page? Fill out an email sign-up sheet? define these conversions and then use analytics to quantify them.
5. Quantify valuable metrics. You may have had 43,00000000 visits to your site over the last year but where did they come from and what did they do? How long did they stay? Did they bounce? (yeah that one is for Jeremy Shaffer for those of you who where there.
6. Segment traffic. It is great to know what is happening with all of your visitors but when you get down to answering questions about specific ad campaigns segmentation really helps you find out about your traffic patterns and customers.
7. Analytics should help you come up with solutions to problems. You can report a problem but you will really shine if you can also suggest a solution based on traffic patterns.
8. Don’t get in the mindset that web based analytics cannot help quantify your traditional advertising. You can give customers unique urls or include tracking data in the url so that you know that traffic to that url is from a traditional campaign.

Hope this is helpful to you, if you have any other tips leave them in the comments below.
David Bates