Are you one of those types of people that loves to quote statistics, do reports put you in your happy place? If you're one of those people and you own a blog or website you are probably already using Google Analytics or you really need to start! Google Analytics gives you all of the statistics you could ever need about visitors to your site.

Traditionally website reports were rather limited. This is mostly due to the fact that reports of this nature are generally hard to interpret (it's true) and the fact that they were usually supplied in narratives, IE Word documents. Google Analytics shook up the program with live, detailed reporting so that you could see an up to the minute look at all the traffic to and within the site and better measure your success.

You're finally open for business, or maybe even you've been up and running for a month. You can see that customers are coming in and peeking around, but you don't know what exactly it is that they are looking at, so you don't know what (if anything) you've put on the website was effective and held their attention. You want to know which pages your customers are visiting, you want to know if those customers come back to the website and what they look at when they do, you also want to see all of the customers that link back to you—well, if you're a stats junkie you probably want to know a whole lot more than that!

Google Analytics has the ability to answer these and other questions, and present those answers in lovely charts and graphs so that you have a visual representation of what is actually happening on your website. The GA reports are all real time and web-based so you can check them out at any time of day. You can even look at them over morning coffee or while watching the Late Show if you wanted. Not only does Google Analytics give you all of the great chart, graphs, and stats you need to really impress the other kids at the office, but it gives them to you on demand!

The up-to-the-minute reports provided by Google Analytics and their easy to read format is just one of the many reasons why Google Analytics is the right tool for you. Pretty graphs are nice—who doesn't love pretty graphs? However, you can usually get someone to provide you with a pretty graph. It is the fact that you can get these pretty graphs at any time of day that makes this tool a winner. The canned reports that come with the tool are useful and provide you with the typical statistics needed to make site-based decisions.