The nature of online business has created a new opportunity for business owners and managers to truly understand how their processes, strategies, and offers are really affecting the success of their site and business. Website analytics or metrics have given us the means to make decisions based on clear, concise, and qualitative data.

Numbers are great little things that have the power to uplift or tear down. There’s nothing like the warm fuzzy feeling that accompanies the numbers that progressively grow with each report. And there’s nothing quite as gut-wrenching as as the sight of those numbers plummeting downward.

But website analytics and metrics is actually about more than just numbers. It’s about understanding what numbers actually matter.

Some of the important aspects of the analytics process are objective standards. Others can be a little more subjective and very specific to your industry or business needs.

The subjective website analytics are based on your Key Performance Indicators (KPI). These are the numbers that show how well you are doing in a certain sector and against a certain standard. These are the metrics you can use to quantify objectives that you have identified as the effective goals or platforms that your company needs to achieve to be successful. They are a way to measure progress. Numbers alone are nice, but when they show you how close you’ve come to your goals or how much further you have to go in order to achieve your goals, they become oh-so-much more useful.

Objective website analytics can start with some obvious numbers. How many people are visiting your site? How did they find your site? What is the bounce rate? What keywords are working well for you?

These are good numbers to know, but it’s not everything you need to know. Numbers and website analytics are great behavioral indicators, but they don’t necessarily give a complete picture.

Consider the brand to non-brand ration of your site. Are your current customers finding you because they were searching for your brand name products or because they were searching for a general product or term? Finding and attracting new visitors who are interested in a generalized product is a great way to build your customer base. If someone has found you based on a name-brand search, chances are they’re already “sold” on your product. You aren’t growing near as much as you could if this is all your are achieving with your marketing strategy.

If someone searches for “Super Expensive Brand Shoes,” it’s safe to say they either already have the intention to buy, or they were already searching for some very specific information. On the other hand, if they searched for “black pumps with little strappies,” now we’re talking about a larger group of people, and a group of people who are open to the possibility of being sold on your shoes. If all you are doing is bringing in the name brand searches, your overall Internet marketing campaign is failing somewhere, and you’re missing out on a very large number of potential sales.

This, then, is where you can apply analytics and metrics. The process is as follows: you learn if you’re drawing in the “little strappies.” If not, change your strategy accordingly. Next, once you’ve gotten them to your site, are they staying or bouncing out? If they’re bouncing, change your plans accordingly. Are they not finding what they wanted? If not, change accordingly. The choice to change is a simple one if you have the right numbers behind you.

There are still a number of other things you need to learn from your website metrics, including keyword yield, visitors per keyword, index to crawl ratio, search engine yield, and page yields. All of these facets make your website analytics strong and more useful. Only then can you make the numbers into a foundation for real improvement.

Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, a Utah SEO and Internet marketing company. Visit their site If you’d like to know more about website analytics and how to employ them in your marketing campaign.

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