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Last time we looked at the basics of Google Analytics. This time we look at how you can manipulate the data to find out what you need to know.

First of all: the date range. You can change this so you can look at a single day, a week, a year: whatever range you want. The screenshot shows the facility on the dashboard but you can change the range on every page.

You can also overlay two periods so you can look at trends month on month, year on year etc. It's doing the same thing with your visitor numbers as you'd do with your sales figures.

Google Analytics means you don't have to guess at how successful something was. You can set up goals to measure effectiveness. Want to know what percentage of people add something to their shopping basket and what percentage completes the purchase? What percentage of people downloaded the report or signed up to your newsletter? You can set up a goal to tell you. It means you can make decisions based on fact rather than guess work.

Google Analytics is a really powerful tool. And best of all - it's free!

Catherine Every at EveryWord
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