Keep Track of Changes to Your Profiles
It's hard to get things right the first time. You may come up with a brilliant plan for your Google Analytics setup and think that you've thought of everything, only to have the data start coming in and realize that things are not looking quite like you hoped they would. Or perhaps your analytics just need a modification and you need to change your goal steps or create new ones. When these kinds of things happen, you may need to alter your Google Analytics profile settings.
And that's OK. While we recommend setting up a "sandbox" profile where you can test what effect changes to your profile might have on your data before editing your main profile, at some point you'll have to make those changes live in order to reap the benefits of cleaner, better data. When this happens, you will want to record those changes.

You've probably played around with the Default Page setting in Google Analytics. In many cases, this is definitely the way to go, as it will prevent your home page from showing up in different ways in your Google Analytics reports (as / and /index.html for example).
One of the great things about Google Analytics is the ability to view overall trends for your website. You can, for example, see how well all visitors who come from AdWords are reaching one of your goals. You can see how valuable the average visit from an email campaign is to your ecommerce business. You can see total transactions and revenue, and see what percentage of transactions are coming from a specific marketing source.


