We launched a website at the beginning of this month.

This is exciting.

Part of the reason it’s exciting is that you can justifiably obsess over your stats (Google Analytics, in my case) for at least two weeks and ohmyGOD there is just so much exciting information to digest.

And therein lies the problem: there is SO MUCH data you can measure, it can be incredibly difficult to know where to start. You want to measure everything, but you don’t know yet what will be valuable, especially if you’re not a straight-forward e-commerce site. This is where it starts to lose the exciting element and become a bit daunting…

Especially when you add in all the other things you have to think about properly now you’re live: SEO for your pages, improving links from third-party sites (which, thanks to this, now has a whole other level of daunt attached), and, of course, creating lots of good content to add to your site every day.

Eeek. Lots to do.

So here are the two things I know for definite:

1. Avoid Black Hat SEO tactics at all costs. Basically, if you write content that your audience likes, Google will also like you better.
2. There will always be other people out there who have had the issues you’re having now, and in a lot of cases will have created resources you can make use of. This econsultancy blog post for example has a really useful list of suggested custom reports ready to go, and they also have a great post about how to set up custom reports.

Essentially – if in doubt, Google it.

Of course.