In any business, online or offline, it's important to know your numbers. Many business owners get lost in the day to day things and forget to watch their stats (statistics). Online, you can track your website stats very easily using google analytics and your shopping cart software. Here are five stats you should be keeping about your site.

#1. The number of leads. Leads online are referred to as visitors, or traffic. For your sales pages, you need to know the unique visitors. If you are checking the stats for a blog, you might want to see daily visits or visits to each post. You can get traffic to your site from various sources: Pay-Per-Click, search engines, social bookmarking sites, your blogs, other peolpes blog, your email list, and more.

#2. conversion percentage. Conversion is a very important number to watch. Many times you will hear internet marketers refer to getting a 1%, a 3% or even 4%. Conversions are figured by taking your total number of sales for a given period, and dividing that by your total visitors for that same period of time. So if I had 3 sales last month, and 100 visitors to my site, thats a 3% conversion. It's best if you know this stat down to the second decimal place, like 1.67%, because improving your conversion even .5% may be huge to your revenues.

#3. Average dollars per sale. This stat refers to how much you make per sale on your site. If you only sell one item on your website for $50, then your average sell will always be $50. But if you have an upsell, or additional items for the buyer to purchase, you will have varying numbers to look at. To figure your average dollars per sale, take your total amount of money collected for a given time, and divide by the number of customers during that time. If you made 23 sales last month, and collected $5000 in total revenues, then your average dollars per sale is $217.39.

#4. Average number of transactions per customer. This stat is key to a stable long term profitable business. This number tracks how many times a customer buys from you. Customers that buy from you once, are likely to buy from you again, if you stay in contact with them. Also, marketing to current customers is always less expensive than acquiring a new customer. To get this stat, take your total number of sales for a given time (month, quarter, year) and divide it by the total number of new customers you got during that time. If I had 2000 sales of my widget last year, and had 200 new customers come into my business, then my average number of transactions per customer is 10. That means that every time you acquire a new customer, based on last years stats, you can expect them to buy 10 items from you over the next year!

#5. Net profit. Many businesses will track their gross revenues, but never know their net profit. This is a very important number to know because it tells you if you are making money or loosing money. A true (unless you are a nonprofit!) business makes a profit. If you are loosing money each month, and don't know it, you really just have yourself an expensive hobby. This number is easy to get. Just take your gross revenues for the month, quarter, or year and subtract out your business expenses. Business expenses are what you need to buy and spend money on to run your business.

If you look real hard at the first 4 above, you should realize that increasing any or all of them at once can greatly increase your net profit. What if you increased just one by 5%, what would that do to your profit? How about if you increased all four by 10%?