Google Analytics™. The greatest (free) metrics tool online
It’s amazing how many companies don’t have metrics for their site traffic readily available. If your site is the front door of your business, don’t you want to know who’s coming in? I’ll use a hypothetical example to illustrate the importance of quality web metrics.
Let’s say you have 3 main product buckets on your home page. These three products make up 75% of your company’s sales. They’re your bread and butter. In your brick and mortar retail store, these products sell at an even rate, making up about 25% of sales individually. On the site, there’s one product that’s failing to come close to that. If you only looked at the sales numbers that would surely tell you that you’re not selling as many units…but that’s it.
Analytics gives you a much more thorough and broad reaching look at what’s happening on your site. Information like who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from, how often, what time, where they’re clicking, how many pages they’re looking at and what page they’re most often bouncing (leaving the site) from are just a few of the options that are available to you using an analytics tool.
The question of which tool is really easy. Google Analytics. It’s a free tool (for sites with 5 million page views per month) and it is organized in a way that’s incredibility easy to use. It’s based on a dashboard layout that allows you to view high-level information and simply drill down to minutia. You can get a great overview of GA on their site here: http://www.google.com/analytics/