It’s free and easy to get started with Analytics, but there are also a lot of advanced features that can make it even more useful. I’m sometimes surprised by how many people only look at their dashboard page and never really drill down into some of the more interesting details and features. I thought it might be time to do post with a few quick tips for getting more out of Google Analytics.

1. Alerts. If you want to keep on top of your sites and know when something out of the ordinary is happening, you should visit the “Intelligence” section and set up a few alerts. You can configure the service to email or text you when something specific happens. For example, on one of my websites, I have it set to alert me when the number of visitors goes over a certain threshold on any one day. Alerts can be set using most of the many different metrics available in the various reports. You can also apply your alerts to multiple profiles and use them on several different websites.
2. Custom Reports. Don’t just use the built-in reports; create your own custom reports (available in the “My Customizations” menu). Spend a few minutes thinking about what you really want to know, and create a custom report that you can view every time you log in. For example, I have a custom report that shows the unique visitors, new visits, time on page and pageviews for each blog post, and when I drill down into a single blog post, I can see which keywords people used to arrive at the page from search engines. The best thing about these custom reports is that you can share them across your Analytics accounts and use them on multiple blogs.
3. Export. Most of us would probably think about exporting our data as a CSV or XML file that we could use to crunch the numbers in some other application, and Google Analytics can certainly do that. However, it can also be used to create some nicely formatted PDFs of your data that you can send to your manager or your clients. This is a great way to quickly give someone who isn’t familiar with Google Analytics an overview of some specific event or a monthly analytics report with little extra work on your part. My favorite is to create a report by exporting from the dashboard, which gives you a multiple page file with overview numbers and graphs for visitors, traffic sources, maps, content and anything else you’ve added to your dashboard. You can get PDF exports by using the “Export” drop-down menu of any report; you can even export your custom reports.
4. Customize Your Dashboard. You should also take the time to customize your dashboard. First, add any frequently-used reports to your dashboard using the “Add to Dashboard’ button at the top of any report. You can even add your custom reports to the dashboard. Each box on your dashboard also has a very faint and tiny “x” in the upper-right corner that you can use to remove any unwanted information. Now that you have the right information on your dashboard, you can use the upper-left corner of each box to drag the components around to put the ones you want to see first near the top of the page. and less frequently-used items further down the page.
5. In-Page Analytics. I saved the best for last. In-page Analytics is one of my favorite features, since it lets you see where people actually click on your pages. You can find In-Page Analytics under the “Content” section in the left-hand navigation. You can navigate to various pages on your website to get a different view of where people are clicking on your subpages. You can also use the drop-down filter at the top to hide any clicks below a certain percentage to focus on where most people are clicking, or you can create your own filters to only see clicks from new or returning visitors, certain geographies, or based on almost any other available metric.

What are your favorite tips and tricks for squeezing more out of Google Analytics?

In my job, I look at metrics in three major categories: awareness, membership and participation. I use website analytics and social media mentions to gauge whether people are aware of our activities. Membership is measured when people join the community or subscribe to mailing lists. Participation is the most important and most comprehensive set of measurements, looking at posts in our forums, mailing list participation, IRC activity and various developer activities, since I manage an open-source developer community. Most of these are measured and charted over time to show areas of growth or decline in the community on a monthly basis, which allows us to make adjustments if anything starts to stagnate. In addition to the numbers, I also do a fair amount of analysis to look for content trends and recommend potential areas for improvement based on how the community responds to certain activities. While this is a significant amount of work every month, all of these measurements allow me to justify my existence (and my paycheck) to the company and my manager while also helping me find areas where I can improve the community.

So how can metrics help you in your role? Many companies already have processes that require measurement of progress toward goals. The type of metrics that I’m thinking about would complement and augment those existing measurements with a few more details. While there are many good ways to measure effectiveness, there are also a few pitfalls, so let’s look at one approach to setting up some personal web working metrics.

Measure What Matters

Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should measure it! For example, I could measure something like the number or hours worked every day or the number of emails sent/received, but those measurements are irrelevant to my job.  As a community manager, many of the community’s metrics also serve as my personal metrics. You need to look at your position, job expectations and goals to find the best ways to measure whether or not you’ve been effective and productive as a web worker. If you don’t tie your metrics into your career goals and specific job requirements, you won’t be measuring the right things.

Pick What to Report

I consume a significant amount of information, and I measure many different activities. Less than half of my measurements or the data that I look at on a monthly basis make it into my report. Let me be clear, this is not about hiding information; it’s about finding a representative data set that can be consumed by most people without an excessive time commitment. I spend a lot of time looking at the numbers because that’s part of my job, but other people also have their jobs to do, so I need to distill the information down to only the most important information. I have a set of things that always go into the report — this is the baseline of activities that I track over time. A few others might be added if something unusual happens or if I notice something really interesting. In other words, measure some extra activities that you can use to determine how you’re performing, but make sure that what you deliver to your manager is a digestible amount of only the most important metrics.

Categorize

Most of us have jobs that span several different areas, and you probably need to measure your performance across a couple of categories. For my community, I break it out into awareness, membership and participation, which boils down to three levels of engagement for community members. As a web worker, you might have a category or two for your core job function and another category for learning, training or other measures related to career advancement. By categorizing your metrics, you can make sure you aren’t neglecting an important area. For example, neglecting training or learning new skills might not matter in the short term, but if you neglect them too long, you might find that your skills are no longer the ones that your employer requires. It’s part of our human nature to categorize, but be careful not to go overboard here. For most people, two to four categories are all you need if you pick the right ones.

This is just one possible approach to using a metrics or numbers-based approach to measuring your effectiveness, but don’t get too caught up in the process. Stay focused on measuring a few of the most important things for your job and build on it over time.

How have you used metrics and numbers to demonstrate your effectiveness as a web worker?

Image by Flickr user Tom Woodward used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

It’s easy to lose track of time and get confused about when you signed that new client and how many jobs you’ve had this month or this year.

Tracking key metrics for your business can help you see exactly how well your business is doing. It can help you make improvements, forecast income and set goals for your future.

But what should you track? The answer really depends on your business. What’s important to one won’t be important for another. In most cases, though, it’s best to keep it simple and not overthink it.

Track Your Income

The most important thing you must know at all times is if you’re making money. Time can pass more quickly or slowly than you believe, making you think you’ve made more or less than you actually have, so it’s important to have regular check-ins to see where you are financially. A good rule of thumb is to check in weekly to see how much you’ve made and where you are in relation to your monthly goal.

Track Your Pending Income

It may seem like you’re coming up a bit short one week, but money in the pipeline may put you back on track. Always keep an eye on the horizon so that you have a better idea of what’s to come for your business.

Track Your Clients, Customers, Jobs or Projects

You need to be able to average your income by client or project so that you can make projections and adjustments for your business and know roughly how many clients or projects you need to meet your income goals. This is also a helpful performance metric. You might see that it took you twelve projects to make the same amount of money as eight projects this time last year.

Track the Sources of Your Business

Are clients finding you through your web site, or are they being referred to you by past clients? Knowing the source of your customers and clients can help you fine-tune your marketing and lead generation plans to make the most of your resources.

Of course, there are a variety of metrics that can be tracked aside from those mentioned here, including your website traffic and subscriber counts, so you’ll need to figure out what’s most important to your business.

Keep it simple, or you’ll be less likely to keep up the tracking. Pay attention to the numbers driving your business, and then figure out how to improve or maintain them.

How do you make metric-tracking easy and painless? What have you found to be the most important things to track for your business?

Flickr image by net_efekt

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Don’t get me wrong, I measure many things and look at the results with a critical eye. I have analytics to measure my blog traffic, tracking tools for social media metrics, business metrics (finance, marketing, etc.), and much more. What I haven’t done is clearly defined what success as a freelancer looks like for me. Do I want steady growth in blog traffic, and if so, how much? What are my financial goals for individual programs (training, consulting, book sales) and overall for my consulting company? How important are various social media metrics to my business?

The measurement options are almost endless. I could measure hundreds of activities and track everything, but I think that I will take my own advice. I generally advise clients to pick the top three to five items that determine success and focus on those items as the primary success metrics. I will continue to measure much more and use those additional measurements as background research to help determine additional ways to improve my business. I think that it is important to draw this distinction between measurement and success metrics. Success metrics determine whether or not you have been successful while measurements feed into your success metrics and can be used to help understand how and why certain programs are a success or failure.

While I figure out how I plan to measure my success, I’d like to hear from you. How do you measure your success?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks