If you have a website, it's important that you have a good analytics (web stats) so that you can monitor the performance of your site.  This is especially true if you run a business or ecommerce website, but can apply to personal and informational sites as well.

The biggest problem most individuals have when collecting stats related to their site is that they focus on the wrong numbers.  For a long time and in the not so distant past, the defacto standard metric was the hit counter, which basically told how many times a page was viewed.   With today's powerful analytics, people are still often concerned with the number of page views or how many visitors, which really isn't a vast improvement over the hit counter of days past.  There are so many more vital metrics that could be monitored to give an accurate picture of your site's performance.

First, let me just qualify why I say the number of visitors or the amount of traffic your site receives is a meaningless metric.  I do understand that without traffic to your site, there's really not much point to having a site other than for your own personal satisfaction.  But just the sheer quantity of visitors doesn't indicate any real level of success if those visitors don't take some sort of action.  For example, I have a site that receives quite a bit of traffic for it's niche, in the order of a few unique visitors ever minute or so (well over 1500 visitors a day).  However, almost 40% of that traffic comes from Canada, and only a small portion of the products available on that site are available for shipping to Canada.  That's why I can't base success on just the amount of traffic alone.

Good analytics will track visitor actions that are important to your business.  Why is your site reaching out to those visitors?  This is the kind of information you should be monitoring and you should have some clear goals so that you can determine if your site is performing like you need it too.  Some examples of the metrics you might consider monitoring include:

• Number of New Customer Leads
  If your site has a contact form or phone number, how many people are contacting you through the website?  Do you have a target for the number of leads you need to generate through your site for it to be worthwhile for you to maintain?   Your goal could be to generate 5 new customer leads a weak through your website.

• Dollar Amount of Sales
  Got a product to sell?  You should be tracking the dollar amount your site is generating.  Are you generating a profit, or does your website maintenance and online marketing costs exceed your website revenue?  You might have a goal to generate $2500 in sales weekly, or to maintain a ROI (return on investment) of 120%.

• Growth of Your Marketing Database
  Do you offer a newsletter or maintain a distribution list?  Perhaps you should monitor and set goals related to the size of your list.  Your strategy might include setting a goal of 10,000 subscribers to your list by the end of the year.

The metrics you track should be directly related to your business goals, and these are almost always related to leads, revenue and cost.  Your web developer and marketing professional should be able to help you work out a plan and systems to achieve those goals and accurately monitor your websites performance.

If you are not already maintaining business oriented metrics, let me offer a couple of good resources:

One resource to consider is Perceptive, our Online Business Platform.  In addition to content management (CMS) and customer relation management (CRM), Perceptive offers built in analytics that give quick insight related to sales and lead generation and historical performance.  If you are running, or plan to run, and online business, you should investigate the Perceptive Online Business Platform to understand the power in can bring to your online venture.

Another great solution and one of the best values on the web today, for sites not hosted on Perceptive, would be Google Analytics.  Google Analytics offers a powerful set of enterprise-class website statistics that rivals some of the best systems currently available, and for a price that's hard to beat (it's Free). 

From time to time I'm going to review products and services I use in running my own business.  This is the first of those posts.  One of the simplest, most affordable and invaluable tools I am currently using is an online invoicing service by FreshBooks.

FreshBooks let's you easily manage your clients, track time, and send invoices by email or post.  It will automatically send reminders to your clients when they get behind in payments.  You can also set up automatic billing for recurring payments.  You can create accounts for different staff members and set unique hourly rates per staff member or project.  One of the features I really like is that other FreshBook users can invoice me and those invoices that I receive also show up in my account.  And it makes all this very simple.  It has a very intuitive interface, with well placed help dialogs.  It really couldn't be easier.

FreshBook allows you to brand the interface, invoices and emails that your clients see with your colors and logos.  The system helps you maintain a professional appearance, helps you invoice more quickly, and helps you get paid faster.

There's quite a few more features that I haven't touched on, like estimates, tracking expenses, data security and multiple payment gateways.  You'll have to visit FreshBooks and take the tour to really understand what all this can do to help you streamline your invoicing.

Best of all, it's free to try out.  This is not some scaled down trial, but the full blown service (you're only limited by the number of active clients and staff your allowed in  your account - they don't even limit the number of days you can try out the service).

If you are still sending paper invoices or not completely happy with your current invoicing system, I would highly recommend you give FreshBooks a try.

As a FreshBooks customer, I will receive a subscription discount if you sign up for the service using the link above.  This endorsement is made not for the purpose of receiving that discount, but because I truly believe this is a great service.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be moving over some of the posts from the blog on my old site.  This is the first of those.  Anyway, here is something I had to work through recently and didn't want to have to hunt down again in the future. I also felt it might be useful to other folks as well - surely I'm not the only one that has tried to do this. After spending too much time trying to find a good way to position a footer centered at the bottom of a browser window, I finally decided I would have to develop my own solution. What I wanted was something that would essentially dock itself to the bottom of the browser but not cover any of the content on the rest of the page. If the page had a lot of content, this wasn't a hard thing to do. But if the page was short, I didn't want the footer to appear just below the bottom of the content, leaving a gap between the bottom of the footer and the bottom of the browser window. The solutions I was finding either left the gap, or some would cause the footer to cover any content that required the page to scroll (it fixed the footer to the bottom of the browser and not to the bottom of the content). I came up with this fairly simple solution that appears to work in IE, Firefox and Chrome.

In the CSS above, the font and color definitions are optional (just to make things clear in the demo below), but almost everything else is required to make this work. Here are some explanations:

• The footer_container is placed below the wrapper and the top margin is set to minus the height of the footer
• The pad div is required to prevent the footer from covering content in the wrapper. This should be an empty div
• The height of the footer, the height of the pad, and the negative margin of the footer_container must all be the same value.
• Don't forget to include the conditional style in the wrapper div - IE doesn't recognize min-height and height must be explicity set.

Check out the Bottom Centered Div Demo to see this in action.