Here’s another example of a scam email, trying to get you to pay for domain registration that is A. not due and B. not due to them. The parts in red I edited to protect my client’s information, but this is the general look and feel of the email.

Installing Google Analytics and correctly using it is the single most important action you can take for your website. One certainty of online marketing is that your first website, keyword choice, landing page, and online ad will all fail to produce the best possible results. To optimize your efforts, you must be able to track how visitors use your website and measure results. If you don’t know where your website visitors are coming from, what pages they are viewing, or why they leave, your optimization efforts are just guesses.

Millions of websites employ Google Analytics (GA) successfully. There are also probably millions more that aren’t using GA to its’ full potential. Here are some of the most common mistakes that GA users make.

1) Ignoring GA Data: All too often a website owner learns about GA from a friend or an article and in a rush of motivation has GA installed. For the first few days afterwards, they check GA a half dozen times a day. 300 hundred visitors today, yippee! Then, they get busy and forget all about GA. As a result, GA never becomes more than an elaborate hit counter.

Quick Fix: Web analytics data is absolutely crucial to your success. If you are not using your analytics, I guarantee it’s worth your time to learn more or seek some assistance.

2) Failing to Setup Goals and Funnels: Setting up goals and funnels for your website is critical to optimizing your site. Goals and funnels are the key to knowing which sources of traffic are most valuable and which parts of your website need improvement. Without them, your optimization efforts will suffer badly.

Quick Fix: Goals and funnels can be easily setup from the profile settings. There are three types of goals to choose from. An “URL destination” goal represents a page that can only be reached by doing what you want, such as a “thank you” or “receipt” page. A “time on site” goal is triggered when visitors spend a certain amount of time on your site and a “pages/visit” goal is triggered when visitors view a certain number of pages. To create a funnel for a goal, go to the edit page of that particular goal. Funnels are excellent for tracking user behavior through a defined series of pages and identifying weaknesses in the process. For example, every checkout process should have a funnel defined.

3) Incorrect Installation: GA requires several lines of code on all of your site’s pages. If this code is incorrect or missing, then your GA account will provide incomplete data.

Quick Fix: EpikOne has a great tool for checking your site for missing and incomplete GA code. Just enter your site here and the tool will test your site. Please be aware that if your site has multiple sub-domains or you want to track users across multiple domains, then you will need to add some additional code.

4) Thinking GA is Only for E-commerce Sites: If you’ve taken the time and effort to build a website then you must have an interest in optimizing it to perform better. GA is great for e-commerce sites, but more broadly, GA provides the information that is necessary to optimize any sort of website.

Quick Fix: Start using GA in all of its glory today!