The Ultimate Google Analytics Video Guide

Google Analytics helps you analyze how visitors find your Web site and their behavior at your site. You can use Google analytics to continually improve your Web site and your marketing campaigns.

Once logged in you'll the dashboard: an overview of some of the most important analytic reports. Although the default report shows you a month's activity, you can change the length of time or even measure your previous month's activity against the same time the previous year.

You can also move the dashboard reports around to suit your needs, add new reports, and remove ones that aren't of importance to your business.

In this video on the Google Analytics dashboard I'll show you how to make those changes to get the most out of your analytics report.

If you spend time on your own site you may be skewing Google Analytics reports, reducing their effectiveness. Luckily, Google gives us filters so that we can filter out internal traffic. In the Google Analytics Filter video below I walk you through how to create filters that will block your own activity at your site.

One of the big reasons you want a traffic reporting system like Google Analytics is to better understand where your Web site traffic is coming from.

Google Analytics breaks down your traffic into 3 categories: Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic and Search Engine Traffic.

In addition, you can also see which search terms people used to find your site under the Keywords tab.

To continually improve your Web site's effectiveness you need to have a better understanding of which pages people are landing on, which pages they're viewing, and ultimately where they're abandoning your site.

Google Analytics provides insights into all these questions, and gives you a cool site overlay that breaks down which links people are clicking on for every page on your site.

Your Web site has conversion points; places where your visitors can take desired actions, moving them down the sales funnel. Maybe it's clicking a "buy now" button, signing up for an email newsletter, or completing a contact form.

By using Google Analytics Goals you can track this activity at your Web site. By setting up goals we can find out not just how much traffic a search engine or Web site is sending us, but what's the quality of that traffic, and even what each lead is worth.