Quoted in Inc. Magazine

The popular Inc. magazine asked me to share my thoughts on how a web start-up could improve its online marketing, by analyzing its Google Analytics stats.

The wealth of data is so great — you might learn, for instance, that customers in Milwaukee typically spend three minutes on your site and use Firefox — that many entrepreneurs find it overwhelming. “If you try to look at every piece of data, you’ll go crazy,” says Andy Beal, an online-marketing consultant and co-author of Radically Transparent, a book on the power of new-media tools to build a brand.

To get a sense of how to use analytics to uncover your website’s flaws and make more money, we asked a fast-growing start-up to let three online-marketing experts review its analytics reports. The panel included Beal; Reid Carr, CEO of Red Door Interactive, an online-marketing firm based in San Diego; and Avinash Kaushik, from Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) analytics division.