Successful online marketers can tell you their web stats from memory: how many hits their site gets every day, week or month, their bounce rate, their best traffic sources and keywords, and much, much more.

Those who sell products from their websites can also tell you their sales numbers: total volume, average sale, their refund rate – even the earnings per click! How do they know all of this? Analytics.

As a business owner seeking more business from the web, how can you tell if your labors are bearing fruit unless you look at your stats regularly? Short answer: you can’t.

Only by checking your stats consistently and understanding what they represent can you make the changes necessary to get the most bang for your online marketing bucks.

First Things First

The first thing you want to do is to bookmark the analytics reports page in your browser. It should take you no more than two seconds to open a browser window to check your stats.

Whether you use Google Analytics or a more robust paid service, just log in, make your way to the main report section, and bookmark the page. If your browser supports a bookmark toolbar, create a button so a single click gives you instant access.

OK, now that you can see your stats quickly, let’s review some of what gets measured, then figure out what you need to look for.

The Basics

Virtually everything that occurs on your website is tracked. Every individual page view. Every download. Every visitor’s IP address, what type of computer they have, even the web browser they use. Key figures include:

Visits: also referred to as user sessions, a visit is recorded each time someone interacts with your site.

Page Views: the number of pages requested and displayed during all user sessions.

Pages/Visit: the average number of pages displayed for each visit. (Much more useful than total page views.)

Avg. Time on Site: How long, on average, visitors stayed on your site.

Bounce Rate: the percentage of visitors who left immediately. In other words, they got to your site, looked around the first page a bit, and then thought to themselves something like, “No, not what I wanted!” and clicked the back button.

Absolute Unique Visitors: This is your best indicator of how many actual people came to your web site.

Beyond The Basics

Now let’s take a look at some of the more interesting information, such as where these people are located physically, and how they found your site.

Map Overlay: Check this to see where your visitors are in the world.

Mobile Devices: People love to surf the web from their phones and tablet computers, and this report will show you exactly which ones have been used to view your site.

Referring Sites: Listed here are all the sites that link to yours and have sent you visitors. You can also see the percentage of traffic from each source.

Keywords: These are the terms people searched for and clicked on when they reached your site through a search engine. Check this often, as you might find some terms you never expected – terms that might be useful for future marketing efforts.

Direct Traffic: These visitors typed your URL in directly, or have your site bookmarked. The pages you publish in your print advertising will appear here.

OK, Now What?

All of this information may be interesting, but how is it useful? For starters, if you compare the numbers from last week to this week, or last month to this month, you’ll begin to notice trends. Identify your site's biggest shortcomings from these trends, and that will help you figure out what to fix.

Is overall traffic your main issue? If you just need more visitors, you may want to consider pay-per-click advertising, or work on getting more sites to link to yours.

Not seeing enough downloads of your “Special Report” PDF? Perhaps it needs a bigger graphic to help people find it, or maybe the copy that “sells” the download needs to be reworked.

How is your “Average Time on Site?” Do you have plenty of visits, but a high bounce rate and a very low pages/visit number? In this case, your problem could be that people aren’t having their expectations met.

For example, if a person searches for “dog training” and lands on your homepage, but then finds nothing about dogs or training – they are likely to leave rather quickly. This could indicate an “on-page SEO” problem.

Your specific challenge could be any of these or something else entirely. The appropriate plan of action to address your needs is likewise unique. Consult with the rest of your marketing team to fine tune your strategy.

Set Goals and Alerts

After you have identified a problem and implemented a solution, use your analytics goal setting feature to track the success of your changes.

For example, let’s say you launched a new ad campaign and your goal is to double your traffic from 100 unique visitors a day to 200. Just create a goal with those parameters, and set up an alert that emails you when that goal is reached.

Goals can be negative, too. You could set one up that notifies you when your traffic dips below what you consider a minimum acceptable level, or when your bounce rate exceeds a certain percentage. Whatever is important can be tracked with an analytics goal.