So, have you ever asked yourself, or have others ever asked you, questions like those below, and others? If you have, did you know how to answer them or what the answers are? If not, shouldn't you be able to? If the answer to that is no, why have you got a website?

- How do I increase revenue from my site?

- Can I increase the number of leads generated on my site?

- How do I optimize keywords for my site?

- Can I decrease my web based customer acquisition cost?

- How do I decrease my online support costs?

- Does "Free Delivery" or a "BOGOF" for web sales increase my margin?

Web analytics provides the foundation for effective online business and marketing decisions about these sorts of question through accurate measurement and analysis of visitors' actual behaviours.

Overall, there are probably four site types.

- Content: Content sites revolve around advertising, with the goal of repeat visits and thus increased advertising exposure. Analytics is about click tracking the ads by content pages.

- Customer Support: It is about self-service model and giving customers the answers they need to reduce call centre or other costs. Analytics is about click tracking the FAQs etc. and marrying the information with other company information to establish what can and cannot be answered effectively this way.

- Lead Generation: Here your goal is to get visitors to submit their contact information so that they can be contacted. Analytics is focused on lead capture to help understand how to increase lead conversion.

- ECommerce: The goal is to get customers to fill their shopping cart and buy. Analytics is about purchases and looking at how the customer reached the point of purchase.

Which type of site is yours?

Not only that what is it you want people to do when they get to your site?

What is the 'target action' for your site?

This is what you need to measure.

Once you have decided that you can move on to the next stage and measure what matters. Then you have to decide how to measure what matters and how to interpret it once you have measured it.

How to measure is to find a good package such as Click Tracks or Google Analytics. Then you need to add the page tags to all pages and gather page-level data for at least 6 to 12 months. You need plenty of data because visitor onsite times are often very short and you do not want or need erroneous results. When you interpret the information, all those pretty pie charts and graphs, make sure you know what else was going on in the timeframe. Your own events such as ad campaigns and PR can influence site traffic, as can world events such as 9/11 so you need to put site traffic into context for the period you are analyzing.