2. Geography: Whether your business is local, national or international, being able to track where visitors are coming from is very important. Analytics allows administrators and marketers to see where people are visiting sites from based on I.P.(Internet protocol) addresses. It is a good idea to track this kind of information so that local or regional ad campaigns can be carried out based on geographical statistics.

3. Pages: Analytics also enables marketers to gage which pages of a site are the most popular by tracking how visitors use the site and by following their most popular paths to the site. This can also help track broken links on a site. If an increased bounce rate happens on certain pages, it may be a red flag that something is amiss.

4. Incoming Links: A key success factor for increasing search engine rankings is having multiple incoming links to your site. Analytics can help gage which referring/incoming links are the most valuable.

5. Keywords: Analytics lets you see which keywords are the most popular at driving traffic to your site. This feature is a good way to judge the effectiveness of your site's content. By tracking the most popular keywords, you can find out if your site is sending the right message.

6. Bounce Rate: A bounce rate reveals how many times visitors exit your site from certain pages. Being able to see where visitors are exiting can help troubleshoot issues such as broken links, page errors, etc.

7. Entrance Rates: The entrance rates on Analytics help you to track where visitors are entering your site. If there are multiple incoming links to your site, such as to the products page, contact forms, or just the home page, the effectiveness of the content prompting visitors to click can be analyzed.

8. Goals: With the Goals feature, it is easy to track specific parts of your site. For example, if there is a contact form that should be filled out for interested visitors, the path to the contact form would be copied into the Goal tool. When a visitor follows that particular path, it is called a Goal-conversion. This is great for all important features of a site, such as portfolios, newsletter sign ups, promotional offers, etc.

9. Adwords: Another great feature about Analytics is that it works with Google Adwords. By syncing these programs together, you can track returns on investment down to the cent.

10. Time: Analytics can also track how long people stay on the site and on each page. Being able to track length of stay is a great way to judge how interesting the content is for each page in comparison to the rest of the site.

For more information on setting up Google Analytics, please Click Here to contact us. For a complete tour of the free software, visit analytics.google.com.

About the Author

Heather Jewell is the Manager of Planning and Administration of NuRelm. NuRelm is a Web software and services firm that focuses on helping non-technical professionals utilize on the Web to build business. For more information, please visit www.NuRelm.com.