How are people finding your web site? Which key words are luring them there? What design elements might be turning them off? As Mashable’s Meghan Peters points out, Google Analytics makes it easy for anyone to track and analyze loads of data that can help improve a site’s performance. Here’s how to get started using it.

First, set up a Google Analytics ^[1] account and create a profile for the site you want to track. Copy the JavaScript code from Analytics and paste it just above the </head> tag in your page or template. WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr users only need to add the code once to the template or theme. Custom-built sites may need to have the code inserted on each page manually. If you don’t know how to do that, talk to your site developer.

From there it’s just a matter of setting up the dashboard in Analytics and customizing it for what data you want to track. Make sure to adjust the time range, which you can set to track information quarterly, weekly, daily or whatever timeframe you prefer. Then experiment with visualizing your data in pie charts or linear graphs.

You can share reports from Analytics by e-mailing them to someone else or by scheduling a recurring report e-mail. They can be exported as PDF, XML, CSV or TSV files.

Read more at Mashable ^[2].