As the smoke settles around the financial debacle, we're figuring out what the heck caused a lot of portfolios to shrink. The more I hear about what went wrong, the more I think that the web can apply some of the lessons learned.

Ok, fine--the world financial system and the web are a little different. But in both, a lot of money can be made--and there are a lot of people jumping in without a clear picture of why, or a solid knowledge of how. Here are three cautionary lessons our industry should keep in mind for 2011:

It's no secret that Viget is a huge fan of Gowalla. As an agency, we have more than 2,000 check-ins at our Falls Church office alone. The geolocation service gained early fans here not only due to its incredible attention to detail and design, but also its increasingly unique gaming component surrounding virtual items (e.g., the Moon Rock I recently picked up). Unlike Foursquare and the other services in the space, Gowalla accessorizes your check-ins with the discovery of highly designed and fun items that you can carry around and swap for others you find, occasionally redeem for physical goods, or hoard away in your permanent collection (called your Vault).

So far Gowalla has conducted a variety semi-noteworthy partnership campaigns (e.g., Gowalla & Incase, Gowalla & NASA, Gowalla & Disney), all which primarily focus on simply finding and collecting unique stamps and items. The usefulness of items in the Gowalla universe has long trailed their appeal. You can't do much with them, but they look great and are entertaining to discover and collect. While the feature has remained a quiet component of the service since its inception, it's becoming clearer that Gowalla is missing out on some great opportunities for its users to interact in more meaningful ways around these virtual goods; and to extend that interaction into the physical space. The possibilities are near endless, but here's a few, Gowalla, for you to chew on:

Recently, I’ve started to revisit the idea of dayparting across several of the campaigns we manage. With the strong focus on keywords, ad copy, and bids, dayparting often gets overlooked when setting up a campaign. It's is a true hidden gem that can help drive additional visitors and maximize ROI.

Dayparting (or “Ad Scheduling” as Google AdWords calls it) lets you schedule the display of your ads for specific days of the week and hours throughout the day.  You can raise or lower the normal bid by a set percentage during each period. This sort of ad scheduling enables you to capture more visitors during your peak traffic times and save money during off-peak times.

If you’re a startup company, you probably have lots to do with limited time and resources to do it.  Setting up and using Google Analytics is no exception: there are many ways to configure your accounts and analyze your data, and sometimes it can feel overwhelming.  It’s easy to become paralyzed by all the options and then end up doing nothing beyond the bare essentials.

The point of this post is to explain two key ways you should filter your data—right off the bat—to help get the most from GA.  These tips will be the first in a short series of posts geared toward helping the startup use GA to its fullest.

First, in one profile, we’ll create a filter to see only our own internal traffic before our site launches—then, in another profile, we’ll exclude it post-launch.  Adding these two filters takes a little extra effort, but I promise that later, you’ll be glad you thought ahead.