Analytics data is great at showing trends in your site's visitors. These trends may be useful for making certain decisions about your site but they're not necessarily the most important focus of your campaign.

Natural versus paid visitors: Be sure, when using analytics, that you're aware of whether you're viewing your natural or paid visitors. If you're not running pay­-per-­click advertising campaign then this is a moot point. Knowing your conversion rate for paid traffic can be critical for the profitability of your campaign. Pay careful attention in Google Analytics because the default setting is to lump all traffic together into one report.

Exit pages: The last page that someone on your site sees before they leave. If it's not the 'Thank you for ordering' page then you should pay attention. If you're seeing a lot of people leaving on one particular page, chances are good that there is something wrong with it. Take a look. How can you make it better and more attractive? Do people need more options or less? How about an exit survey?

Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of people that enter your site, view the one page they came in on, and then leave. If you wrote a particularly interesting article that's getting a lot of links, then it may just be that people are coming to read the article and then leaving. This is especially true for how-­to articles like 'How to tie a necktie' or 'How to write a testimonial’. People are there to find out something, and then they leave. Keep them around by offering related content. 'Two more ways to tie a necktie' might get them to stick around and read a bit more—if that's your goal. Bounce rate might also be an indicator that your site is targeting the wrong crowd. Maybe you sell windows but people are searching for Microsoft Windows software. It's important to understand what terms are great and which ones are over­used for you to target.