Keeping Your Thumb on Your Site’s Pulse with Analytics

Here’s a great trick I use to make sure business owners (including myself!) stay up to date on their own sites:

1. Log in to Analytics
2. Set up an appropriate dashboard (or just use the default)
3. Click the date range
4. Select the previous month
5. Click ‘Compare to Past’ and ‘Apply’

Here’s how that looks:

Now you can see how the site did last month compared with
the previous month. This is handy, but to make sure the biz
owner (even if that’s YOU) stays in touch with this:

6. Click the ‘Email’ link at the top of the report
7. Click ‘Schedule’
8. Fill in the rest of the details

I usually set this up for monthly emails, but some folks like
weekly. After you’ve had Analytics on the site for a year,
it’s also nice to do a comparison against traffic a year ago instead of the previous month, so you’re showing annual trends (holidays, etc.).

I hope this helps you get a handle on your site’s traffic!

-glenn