You probably wondered why I haven’t said anything about this major news released last week. That’s because I’ve been testing it. The biggest bummer is, it takes 24 hours to gather any data. This thing is HUGE… at least in the beginning. There’s so many fancy, shiny controls and links makes my head whirl but… once the data starts rolling in, it’ll become clearer what they are for and how to better utilize them. It’s only been a few days and I haven’t had much opportunity to check it. However here are my preliminary thoughts:

• Goals – I like that. To be able to find out how much of my traffic has been converted either to sale or newsletter signup
• I’ve noticed a few new keywords used to find my site that I’ve never seen before – interesting.
• Bounce rate – this is a percentage of how many people landed on that page and exited on that same page. I’ve never thought much about that kind of information before and I don’t know if I what I see, however, I do believe my results are pretty typical. Still… I now know what should be my next steps
• Funnel – this is what many marketers call the slippery slide. E.g. the site should guide a visitor to move from one thing to another and finally finishing up by doing what you want them to do that is buy or signup for something. The funnel statistics will show you how many people made it through that process and how many dropped out and where. I haven’t set it up but again this is good. It helps me realize I should have a funnel in place so my next steps would be to map one out.

That’s pretty much how far I’ve gone. When I have anything further to report, you’ll read about it here.