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).