How often do you remember to check the Google Analytics data for your website?

I can go several months without thinking about it and that means I am missing out on valuable insights into the success of my online marketing efforts.

For that reason, I have asked Google to automatically email me my top reports. On the first of the month Google Analytics kindly sends me these 4 reports as PDF documents:

1) Top 10 Blog Posts on www.calszone.com

2) Top 10 Web Pages on www.calszone.com

3) Top 10 Referral Sources to www.calszone.com

4) Top 10 Referral Links from www.erpsoftwareblog.com to www.calszone.com

From these reports I can tell:

· Which topics my blog readers are most interested in (which gives me ideas for new blog posts).

· Which pages on my website are the most popular (which determines which ones I link to from blog posts and promote on the home page).

· Which sites refer the most traffic to my website (which helps me determine where to build links and pay for directory listings).

And since www.erpsoftwareblog.com is always the top referring site I can also tell:

· Which pages from the ERP Software blog site send my site the most traffic (which is actually the Directory-By Location page).

Setting up an automated report is very simple.

1) Log in to your Google Analytics account.

2) Find the report you are interested in.

3) Click “Email”.

4) In the pop up box enter your email address, report format and frequency.

Looking at these reports each month helps me to keep track of what my readers are interested in.

Once a quarter, and at the end of each fiscal year, my excellent assistant Stacy compiles a more detailed report in Excel that tracks and compares all of our important statistics for www.calszone.com from Google Analytics. The report shows:

· Page Rank

· Sessions (Visitors)

· Sessions Same Quarter Previous Year

· % Increase Over Previous Year

· Pages/Sessions

· Organic Search

· Direct

· Referral

· Social

· Other

· Email

· Display

· Paid Search

· Referring Sites

· Referral Count

· Twitter Followers

Google Analytics shows that our website traffic has increased 604% since FY2010 when we started focusing on inbound marketing. My boss, like most Microsoft Dynamics partners, is a numbers guy. So using this report I can prove that our online marketing strategy is working when asking to increase the budget.

What will your Google Analytics reports tell you?

By Anya Ciecierski, Collaboration Works Marketing

www.cwmktg.com

Follow me on Twitter: @AnyaCWMktg