You don't know what you don't know.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend an in-depth training on Google Analytics (GA). For those who aren't familiar with that platform, GA offers detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources, and measures conversions and sales (thank you, Wikipedia, for summing that up so nicely). I consider myself a pretty tech-savvy person, but I realized three key things as a result of this training:

1. I should have brought Advil to class: my head was pounding after 16 hours of instruction.
2. I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did, which was both incredibly humbling and overwhelming.
3. I needed help getting 50+ properties' GA accounts up to snuff, stat.

Sometimes, you don't know what you don't know, until someone turns on the light...and what you thought was a tiny ice cube turns out to be a glacier, with miles of uncharted territory just waiting to be explored. If you have any interest in tracking the performance of your online marketing efforts, I highly recommend that you get yourself familiar with GA, even if you have other tracking mechanisms in place. My training was though LunaMetrics, and was really well done. (LunaMetrics also does implementation work, though I'm exploring a few options within the multifamily industry for our purposes.)

I love the challenges and opportunities that come with learning new things, and next week, I'm off to Napa, California, for the Multifamily Social Media Summit. The Summit was one of the best conferences I attended last year, and this year promises to be outstanding, too — I can't wait to see my industry friends and get inspired. If you can't get to Napa, follow the conversation on Twitter at #mfsms.

Cheers to learning!