Industry domination
The way in which the system has been put together demonstrates an extremely sharp understanding of how to analyze websites. Web analytics systems can, and do, produce hundreds of metrics. This can completely overwhelm anyone. Experience teaches us that the secret is to focus on what really matters. We have learned that a limited number of measurements are critical key performance indicators of visitor behavior. In the industry, these are jokingly referred to as the "key key" performance indicators (or KKPIs). These KKPIs enable you to successfully see if a site is appealing to a particular audience. These are average pages per visit, the average time on the site, and (most importantly) bounce rate.
The importance of these numbers is determined by what percentage of the total readership any given group constitutes. A bad number for a tiny subset is rarely worth the money or time it would cost to improve. It is also useful to know what percentage of this group are repeat vs. new visitors. This is because most sites get their income primarily from one type or the other. In addition, well-designed sites have different layers of content for each type.
What Google has done is make these five numbers consistently available for almost every report. Next, they have taken every measurement that is technically possible to get with today's technology and allowed you to cross-reference these critical measurements against them.
For example, I can compare bounce rate by screen resolution to determine how my site design works on different screens. This is an important issue at present as designers push people to drop support for 800x600 so they can do more visually exciting work. I was able to look at this issue for a client recently with Google Analytics and show them that failing to support this resolution was costing them $100,000 a year in lost sales. Small percentages add up to big numbers on busy sites.
Coming from another angle, I can review bounce rate by country or city. This will tell me how my site appeals to different regions. In fact, I can compare bounce rate by keyword, by search engine, by affiliate site, by ad campaign and probably by eye color for all I know.
Throughout all this, Google Analytics shows me how the numbers for the group I am looking at vary from the overall averages for the site. This type of reporting enables me to identify which visitors are in need of attention. All the tables are clickable so that I can instantly drill down on the elements that stand out. For example, I recently analyzed the performance of a tourist site's listings in travel directories. I was able to drill down on specific directories and see which pages and descriptions were working and which were not. Within the same directory, I could see some listings that had a bounce rate of 9 percent and others with a bounce rate of 70 percent.
Next: An ounce of deception