From the Editor:

We're back again with a slightly different bent on the topic of analytics. This month it's Analytics in Action, looking at how you can use Analytics to enhance your SEO, maintain your website, optimize your sales process, and more.

Of course all of this assumes that you've got an analytics platform installed and setup accurately. If not, well... you may want to contact us.

Fixing your 404's with Google Analytics

Fixing your 404 errors means more than just redirecting a URL. URL redirection will keep linkjuice flowing into your site, but what about visitors who find that what they're looking for isn't what you've redirected to? What if a high authority site is linking to a page that doesn't exist, and you don't want to take a chance with linkjuice loss from it? Using Google Analytics to examine your 404's you can tell both what is 404ing to you and how you should go about fixing it.

Web Analytics and international SEO

International SEO can be a huge issue for native English speakers. Understanding the minutiae of different languages can require an understanding of cultures that goes far beyond using the correct TLD, or the right language. Fortunatly there are a few ways that you can use your analytics platform to understand and target your international SEO efforts.

The most basic must have custom report

Knowing how to analyze data can be intimidating, but there are a few simple reports that you can use to learn about your visitors. This report simply helps you understand how goal conversions are relating to visitor counts, and to revenue value, allowing you to monetize your efforts.

Analytics Fight Night: Average-Time-On-Site and Average-Time-On-Page are Useless Blog Metrics

In this post Kent C. argues that Average Time On Page and Average Time On Site are deceptive measurements, due to Google Analytics means of measuring each. He insists that, given their reliance on proceeding page loads, they can not give reliable data about visitor actions on websites such as blogs, where people frequently leave after reading a post. Hopefully counter arguments from Brian Katz are to follow.

Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics - Interpreting the Data

We've previously described our methods for combining Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, however in this post Andre W. we explain how to use these two tools in combination in order to truly understand your tests.

From the Net:
How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics

Most analytics packages use last-touch attribution (conversions are attributed to the the most recent source of a visit), which is a decent way to think about metrics, but sometimes you want more. In this post SEOmoz looks at how to attribute first touch, or even multiple touch points.