I have a confession to make.  I don’t look at my web analytics as often as I should.  I know – the sacrilege!  Luckily, we have a search guru on staff to pick up the slack, but for most businesses, this isn’t the case.  Website monitoring is often relegated to the first available hand, who may or may not be as forgetful as I am.

Try using a desktop widget for Google Analytics called Polaris.  It gives you all your website stats in a user-friendly desktop interface, including:

• Dashboard
• Visits Overview
• Map Overlay
• Traffic Sources
• Referring Sites
• Top Content
• Keywords
• Goals

You can edit the date ranges for each report or toggle between different profiles if you’re monitoring more than one website.  Granted, this is the same information you can pull from your Google Analytics account, but Polaris puts it in a convenient little package.  For data phobes, it’s an easy way to digest your web activity, and might I add, an attractive addition to any desktop landscape.

Polaris is a free download and only requires your Google Analytics login to work.  The real idea, plain and simple, is visibility.   By keeping your most important data front and center, you’re more likely to act on it.   Websites aren’t meant to run on autopilot.   They require constant monitoring and optimization.