Most people that don’t put too much thought into their websites do the following: they log into Google Analytics (GA), check and see how traffic was yesterday, maybe click into the Traffic Sources section to see if there is any pattern there to explain the drop or rise in traffic, and then go back to doing their thing. Selling widgets, blogging about cats—whatever.

But if you don’t have a defined goal for your business, then you’re not only missing out on one of the coolest parts of GA, you’re also selling your site/business short. So ask yourself the questions: what’s the goal of me site? What am I trying to accomplish?

Everything on the page (and everything you do) should be geared towards that one goal. Whether it’s selling more widgets, increasing pageviews, making more money, etc. This will also help you make tough decisions about your business by simply asking yourself “which makes the most sense to continue to achieve our goal?” You’ll know which decision to make if you let your goal be your guide.

But you have to have a goal.

And once you do, you can have GA track it for you by setting up goals. What you’ll be able to see once you’re all set up is the conversion rate for your users, which you can break down into any of the slices of traffic you want (users from Finland that use Chrome, for example) and see which users convert best. It’s the kind of insight that causes “aha” moments and can improve conversion across the board.

Not only that, you can see conversion funnels too, which are a nice graphic depiction of where in the process of achieving the goal they drop off. If you notice most users dropping off at the sign-up page, then you know there’s something you can fix there.

If you’re a blogger, the goal-setting can be a little tricky. What is your goal? It could be to have users join a mailing list, read one specific post, or something as simple as subscribing to your RSS feed. If you’re a blogger and you can’t figure out a goal for your site, use RSS subscriptions. It encompasses a lot of things: are you writing interesting content that people like and keeps them coming back for more? Are you networking and getting the word out there so that more people come to your site? Are you selling yourself enough?

Tracking RSS subscribers via Feedburner is great, it gives you a nice, overall count and a trend of how you’re doing over time. But placing it as a goal in GA means you’ll be able to find out a lot more about your users. If users from a guest post at Sidehustleblogging sign up at a much higher rate than users from any other site, maybe you should figure out what it was about that guest post or what it is about Sidehustleblogging and their readers that “clicked” so well.

Then you try to replicate it.

That’s what analytics is all about: noticing patterns and repeating them to achieve your goals. Just make sure you have a goal to begin with, or else none of this will matter.

Image by D-32

The Google Blog has a great guest post up today from Tom Critchlow of Distilled titled Using The Wrong Tracking Code Can Cost You $500k a Year. In it, Tom goes over a very simple error that can cause a huge drop in conversion for a very specific slice of users—those using Internet Explorer 8.

It seems like such a non-issue until you see how the conversion rate for those users sucks compared to everyone else. And all because of a simple little thing like not using Google’s latest code.

I think a lot about how this stuff (analytics and numbers) can help people and small businesses with their sites, and this post is a great example of something that’s small, easy to fix, and has a huge impact on the bottom line.

Analytics can do a lot of stuff to make you smarter about who you target, how to target them more efficiently, and how to expand your reach on the web as quickly as possible. But when it comes down to it, what we all want to do is make more money and spend less time doing it.

Nice work Tom—well done.