Phase 1 – Benchmarks
Within days you start to see volume of traffic, unique visitors, number of pages viewed, time on site, location around the world, most popular content and more. These preliminary results establish a benchmark and start you thinking about how to improve your numbers.

Phase 2 – Compare to Past
Within a few months you notice the compare to past tools and start looking at the metrics from one month to the next. You overlay your knowledge of what marketing efforts are happening and start to make conclusions about what is driving quality traffic and what is not working.

Phase 3 – Campaign Tracking
Now you consider ramping up your marketing efforts but want an easier way to see how the various promotions are doing so you find the campaign tracking tool that automatically creates a URL embedded with a code for google to track it separately. From one screen you can see how all your campaigns are doing and even adjust the time period to gain more insight.

Phase 4 – Custom Segments
Then one day you notice a new feature in the lower left called custom segments. You click and realized that you can build profiles based on any data google offers. You create a group of users who looked at 1 page and another group of users that looked at more than 3 pages to see if there are any differences. You create a group of users outside the U.S., one within the U.S. and one in the northeast to see if behaviors change. You even create a group of people who viewed the client login screen and make a reasonable assumption that they are clients. By this time hours have elapsed.

What’s really amazing though is you had no experience with any metrics before and now you are a master of the data. That is the brilliant simplicity of Google Analytics.