David: What are the most important reports in Google Analytics? How should you customize your dashboards and what metrics are the most important to be keeping an eye on? Those are just three of the questions that I’m going to be asking our special guest Alan Morte today about Google Analytics. Alan thanks for joining us on DMR.

Alan: No problem. Thank you having me. I appreciate the time.

David: Alan is the president of Three Ventures where he uses analytics to help his clients increase the ROI from millions of dollars marketing spend annually. So Alan, is it nearly always Google Analytics that your clients use or are you finding that other tracking tools are just as popular?

Alan: There are other tracking tools that are just as popular. Google Analytics has the brand name behind it. Obviously you have Adobe’s products and Omniture but really it just depends on … Its going to really depend on the CTO and the technology staff and what their preferences are but Google Analytics really they do a good job with offering a free version where a lot of startups or lot of baby companies that started in 2005-2006 have implemented the products since its early infant stages and now they are getting to the point where they are becoming bigger companies heading to 5, 10, 15, 20 million dollar in annual revenue range that they already have Google Analytics in place.

We definitely see a lot of companies using Google Analytics. As far as it being the best tool, I think that varies client to client depending on what exactly the goals of the business are; maybe the plan or objectives of the quarter year etc.; maybe five year plan something like that.