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Wow you go away for a day or two and, even though everything functions smoothly while you're away, playing the game of catch-up after you get back is a total bitch.

Of course there will be some who say that you should never go away if catching up afterwards is such a problem ... and we don't usually go away mid-week ... but having the opportunity to attend a Google Master Class was just too much of a temptation to pass up.

And that's where Steve and I have been ... at a Google Master Class. They fed us well ... there was plenty of coffee ... and lots of valuable information. Interestingly the two speakers were not Google employees and they weren't afraid to dump on Google when they didn't agree with what Google was doing so we learned a lot.

One of the points that the main speaker made was that Google Analytics is a wonderful program that most of us use ... but it's not perfect and there's information in there that is just about useless to everyone even though it might look very important.

So today I thought I would point out three of those useless bits of data just in case you've been reading too much into figures that really doesn't tell you anything.

Time on site
Let's start with this one because many people think that it's very important without realising that it's totally inaccurate.

By providing figures relating to the time that people spend on your site Google is implying that it knows exactly how long people spend on your site when the reality is that Google has no clear idea of how long people spend there.

To arrive at the figure for time on site Google measures the time a visitor spends on each page because it can track the time a visitor arrives on a page and the time that visitor leaves the page for the next one ... on your site.

But what Google can't measure is the time a visitor spends on the last page that they visit on your site. They know the time a visitor arrives on the last page they visit but they have no way of knowing how long the person stays on that last page before they leave.

So they could stay there for five minutes or 25 minutes ... Google has no way of knowing.

Bounce rate
Oh so much has been written about bounce rate ... people have been waffling on about the importance of bounce rate for ages and most of what has been said about bounce rate is total garbage.

For most of us a high bounce rate is a sign of success. We don't want people hanging around on our websites wasting our bandwidth ... we want them to get off our sites and head for our sponsors ... so a high bounce rate is good and what we should be aiming for.

And don't believe for one moment that Google uses bounce rate as a ranking factor ... because it doesn't.

In-page analytics
The first time I saw this in Google analytics I was stoked - it really did look as though Google was able to show us how many people clicked on each of the links on a page and that was wonderful news. But the fact is that Google isn't telling us that 42% of visitors to our site clicked on a particular link.

Google might know how many people clicked on a particular link but they're not telling us that. Hover over the little orange percentage boxes and read what appears. Sure. you're looking at a particular link and seeing a number supplied by Google but that number does not apply to that particular link.

What Google is showing you is how many visitors clicked on that link wherever it might appear on the page. So if you have a top navigation bar with links in it and a bottom navigation bar with the same links in it and some of those links in the nav bars also appear in the text on the page Google counts all the clicks on each of those links ... adds them all together ... and displays the total against the top link.

So you may think that a gazillion people are clicking on the links in your top navigation bar when in fact no one may be clicking on any of the links at the top of the page. I don't know about you but that makes me wonder why they bother to include that data at all.

It doesn't tell me anything that I can't pick up from other data sources within Google Analytics.

And that's where I'm going to leave you for this week ... Friday afternoon approaches and I'm still playing catch-up and that does nothing to make me a happy little camper.