If you're not using Web Analytics on your site, you're missing valuable "free" marketing and advertising insight. The most basic information every site owner should know is how many unique visitors & page views they have per month and the average time spent on the site.
One of the most important aspects of owning a Web site is knowing what actions visitors take while spending time on your site. Web analytics applications such as Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst provide site owners with an abundant amount of data. What matters to one site owner may not matter to another. What's important is that you're using some sort of package on your site.
If not, you're wasting valuable information that can be used not only for marketing purposes, but also in a site redesign. A proactive site owner takes notice of what pages their visitors most frequent and determines what actions to take that may improve site flow. Using this data also goes a long way to determine what additional content may need to be added or if the site navigation needs to be updated.
A quality web analytics package has traffic source reports that tell you what keywords visitors are using to find your site as well as a breakdown of where your traffic comes from. These metrics are usually broken down into the following categories: Direct traffic, referring sites and search engines – organic & paid. You can also set up tracking to see what search terms visitors look for using the site's internal search tool.
Google Analytics and Yahoo! Index Tools (in limited beta) are the top free web analytics programs and are usually sufficient for small- to medium-sized businesses. They're also releasing features such as custom reporting and advanced segments similar to subscription based enterprise-level products by Omniture and Coremetrics. Don't get me wrong, there is still a large market for the paid tools as they provide advanced features not available from the free services.
In upcoming posts, I'll share thoughts on the most important metrics and go into detail about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
