However, what really got me thinking was that a great description of an existing business could be quite similar to a pitch for a proposed one, and we all need to create a great description of our business …for our own website. After all, the "About Us" page may well be your most-read on your whole site, after the home page.

So how can we modify a new business pitch to be an outline for describing your existing business? Here's what I'd suggest. Start with a quick overview, then describe the market you address, and why you're the right supplier for that market. Then move on to describe why the products are so good, both technically and in terms of availability. Finally, talk about the team and summarise why being one of your customers is such a desirable thing to be. The result will be better than most of your competitors' About Us pages, I can guarantee.

How's your About Us page looking?

As with any Google Analytics reporting, be careful not to waste time on this information just because it's fun to play with. If it doesn't offer answers to things you needed to know, then just file it away under "tools which might be useful one day". However, you might well find, for example, that certain pages on your website are getting lower click-through rates from Google search than others, and if you can work out why, you could use the information to improve them. I've certainly had one or two intriguing insights.

How many times a day do you feature in the Google results?

The study ponders why people continue to use folders when it's not as efficient as throwing emails into a big pile and letting the computer do the work. Its authors conclude that it's not to make it easier to find those emails later, but a reaction to being overwhelmed by email volume. They conclude that users receiving many messages are more likely to create folders, "possibly because this serves to rationalise their inbox", allowing them to better use the inbox as a task to-do list, another inefficient practice.

If you still love dragging your emails into an ever-expanding list of folders, just try using the search facility for a while, and you may well never look back. I'm just off to do a triumphant lap of honour around the office.

Thanks to reader Juri Romito for pointing me in the direction of this article.

Read more: Want to be more productive? Don’t file your email on the Box Free IT site

Emails: Are you letting your PC's brain take the strain?

Anyone reading this who has Google Analytics on their website and doesn't spend considerable amounts of time with it, is probably wasting a lot of money in lost marketing efficiencies. Printing out a graph of the total number of website visitors every month is, quite frankly, useless. Yet it's all that some companies do with this fantastic tool.

We recently did a two-hour exercise for a client, examining the true results of various advertising outlets they'd used in 2011. To their horror, only one online advertising initiative had generated profitable results, and over a third of the money they'd spent had produced no measurable results at all. Meanwhile, a relatively obscure website, which didn't even appear to offer any advertising opportunities, was sending a steady stream of good traffic. They'd never have guessed.

The key to this job, as with everything associated with website visitor analysis, is to ignore all the default data you're presented with, and ask yourself: "What do I really need to know, and can Google Analytics tell me that?" In this case, the client needed to know the amount of good quality visitors which various websites and emails had sent them, and to split that into those they'd paid for and those they'd have got for free anyway. Although in many cases things hadn't been set up to record that data as specifically as required, we were able to show how various external links could be changed so that the data would be recorded in future. Next year's annual review will be genuinely illuminating.

Are you making the most of your visitor analysis?

Of course, if I may shamelessly advertise the fact, you could get us to run your AdWords campaign for you. There are loads of good reasons for doing so, and you can request a copy of our 2012 AdWords Guide here if you'd like to be persuaded why. If your market is limited enough in size that there's only a few hundred pounds a month of search traffic out there, you may be better off running your Google AdWords campaign in-house. But when there's enough out there to justify about £750 or more, we think outsourcing the campaign makes a lot of sense.

Still, for industrial and scientific companies even a poorly-run, in-house Google AdWords campaign is better than none at all. Unless you're single-mindedly into branding rather than enquiries, every other form of advertising is, in comparison, a luxury nowadays. From what I can see, the response which businesses are getting from other forms of advertising is currently a bit of a joke.

Is February 2012 the time to make changes to your advertising?