Google Analytics is by far the most integrated web-site traffic analysis tool for free online. If you associate your Google AdWords and Google Analytics account, you can easily determine which Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads are delivering the highest conversions, and which ads aren’t. This gives marketers the unprecedented ability to track the effectiveness of advertisements and prove a campaign’s ROI instead of relying on circulation numbers and other averages.

It’s a bit scary to realize how much information can be tracked with Google, but rest assured you’re only tracking visitors movements on the sites that you have development access to.

I won’t bore you with a reinterpretation of the excellent video put together by Google itself on the basics of site analytics, but this video is just the tip of the iceberg. You can easily get lost in the mountains of data, but if you stay focused on what’s important to you, analyzing your site’s traffic and making informed decisions backed by data on how to improve your web site will become second nature.