How many visitors have you had to your web site at the moment? Where (geographically) did they arrive from? At what time did you feel your heaviest traffic? Was your website accessed through a referral site or a search engine? These are the questions that you as a website developer/owner/operator should be asking. If you are merely looking for to make better traffic, or you want to decide how much to spend on advertising, web analytics are crucial.
An outstanding illustration of how useful a good analytics system can be is with e-commerce. If a website sells eggs at $40 per barrel, the webmaster can use analytics to decide if the people clicking on the sites ads are buying the $40 barrels of eggs. If he determines that the people coming from the ads are buying 10 barrels a day, he knows that the $200/month he spent on ads is absolutely working out. He can then buy advertising more assertively and decide what percentage of his profit should go towards advertising.
Answering the ‘who, what, when, where, and why’ of those individuals accessing your site is also of critical value. Through the correct use of web analytics you can shape and form your business into an on-line power house and compete on any level. Let us use, for instance, the simple statistic of traffic. After quite a few months of following the web analysis of your provider on traffic you become aware of that visits to your site are highest in the middle of the month in opposition to the start or the end. However, during the month of October you observe very little traffic at all. You start on to study and understand that you must be doing something unusual. You rapidly understand that during the previous months you had a radio ad that was running that you had cut because you felt it was not creating sufficient traffic. You quickly call the radio station and secure an open slot for December!
This is one illustration of how web analytics provide a useful tool in the development and maintenance of your users. Using analytics can allow an easy edge over the competition; it is oftentimes unnoticed and well thought-out as a nice graph to look at. Those who relate themselves with the true understanding of these stats and put on them to their bottom line will find their sites much more useful. Do not undervalue the power of your web analytics. Use them to push your on-line presence. You will be happy with your enhanced results!