Who stayed and for how long?
What pages are performing the best/worst?
These are a few important questions to ask yourself about the ongoing health of your website and Google Analytics has the answers. Best of all, it's free.

Below is a recent screen shot of the Dashboard of one of our Google Analytics accounts for May 17th - June 16th. All data can be viewed specific to any time period (Hourly, daily, monthly, yearly) and then compared against historical data.




Because it can be overwhelming at first to try to make sense of all the available information here are a few key terms to pay attention to.

• Visits tells you how many visits there were to your page. A visit is defined as a page view when that user has viewed no other page on your site in the past half hour.
• Pageviews tells how many times the pages on your site have been viewed.
• Pages/Visit tells how many pages, on average, users view when they come to your site.
• Bounce Rate shows what percentage of users left after viewing only one page on your site. The lower the better.
  
• Avg. Time on Site shows how long each user spent on your site.
• % New Visits shows what percentage of your users have not visited your site before.

How to start using Google Analytics

Step 1 - Visit the Google Analytics Sign Up page and create a new account.
Step 2 - Once you have an account, use your new name and password to log in at the main Google Analytics page. You will be shown a step-by-step setup wizard for configuring your new account.
Step 3 - At the end of the setup wizard Google will give you a snippet of code. Copy and paste the tracking code to your pages directly above the < /body > tag (Note: The code must be placed on every page that you want to track). Once the modified pages are uploaded, Google will start tracking your website's traffic.

This is just scratching the surface of the capability of Google Analytics, I will be posting on advanced analytic techniques including how to track and improve lead conversion in the near future.