Once you get Google Analytics set up, the next question someone usually asks is: What do I pay attention to? In my view, the following metrics are useful for a first timer. Consider this a kind of Google Analytics 101.

Visitors: Many people still focus on hits, which the number of times a particular file is pulled from a server. But it is more relevant to pay attention to the pages that people who come to your site actually see. Some people also still pay attention to page views. This is also inaccurate, 1000 page views is irrelevant if the same person loads a page 1000 times. You care how many unique people look at the page. This is the visitor metric. Google analytics give you a decent amount of visitor related data.

Bounce Rate. Bounce rate is a metric of how many visitors come to you site, look at 1 page for a short time, then go somewhere else. It is a measure of how dull and irrelevant your pages are. A high bounce rate is bad, but you will never get to a 0% bounce rate. Google analytics also gives you bound rate per page, so you can find your worst offender.

Traffic Sources. This is a useful metric, since it tells you where your traffic is coming from, whether is from search engines, referring sites (sites which have links to you) or direct access (people who have a bookmark to your site or type the url in directly.)

Other metrics, like %New Visits, can be useful or not, depending on the type of site you have. If you are a lead generation or political site, then % New Visitors is a good metric, because it shows new visitors to your site that are now aware of what are doing. If you are a media or content site, you want a lower number, because repeat visitors are more valuable.

Google analytics as an enormous number of free options for the casual web user.

Once you get a handle on these, you have the basics to proceed to the next level of analytics, conversion and SEO(search engine optimization). More on that in the next article in this series.