Analytics: Can You Dispense With It?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you run a business site of any kind then you’ll need some way to measure your traffic and conversions that you generate from all sources including your search engine optimization efforts.

Google Analytics works as a free package and there are several paid analytics packages that are worth the investment as well. Whether you pay or not is up to you, but you definitely need the minimum package and Google Analytics is enough for most webmasters to get a good idea of the usage on their website.

You need to concern yourself with more than just traffic, however. You also need to look at where your traffic is coming from (traffic sources), how long visitors are staying on your site, which pages they visit the most, how long they stay on those pages, exit links used, conversions, and even where users abandon transactions without completing them. Anything you can imagine that might be important for helping you determine how your site is used by your users, you should measure that and track it. A good analytics package can help you do that successfully.