Setting up a web analytics program doesn't necessarily require tons of effort or expense, but we admit that it may very well involve some hoop-jumping and budget-bumping on your part. And perhaps you're wondering: Just what am I going to get out of all this? While there are thousands of reports, charts, data visualizations, and trend manifestations out there, you can go a long way with just a few simple pieces of information.

These key metrics are:

Unique Visitors and Page Views Knowing the total traffic to your website doesn't tell you much. It won't tell you whether your visitors are the ones you targeted, what path they took through your website, whether they made a purchase, or how happy they were during their visit. Nevertheless, it's one of those little numbers that you. just. need. to. know. Your web analytics program will do its best to determine a total number of unique visitors based on IP addresses and any other info it can gather. Admittedly, the number is not perfectly accurate. But it's a good tool for tracking trends. After all, what does it really matter if you had 1,015 or 1,045 unique visitors this week? What matters most is whether you're up or down from last week.

And while you're at it, banish the word hits from your vocabulary. Hits describes the number of times a request is made to your server, and page views describes the number of times an entire page is called by a browser. So if there are dozens of images on a given page, there will be dozens of hits recorded for each page view. Depending on your conversion goal, you may want to focus on the number of page views or unique visitors, but never hits.

Referrers and Keywords After all your link-building efforts, wouldn't you love to know which sites are actually sending you traffic? After optimizing for the search engines, wouldn't you love to know which search terms your visitors used to find you? This is where your stats start to become truly useful to your SEO campaign. Your analytics program can tell you where your site visitors came from, and even more important, for those who came to your website from search engines, it can tell you the exact keywords they searched for. This can be a good source of ideas for new keywords to target. It is sure to tell you whether your paid directory listings are worth their cost. And it may even give you insights into what new content you should be developing for your site.

Keep in mind, referrer (also called traffic source or acquisition source) data is limited to folks who clicked to your site from another site on the Web. Users who typed your URL directly into their browsers, or clicked from a bookmark, or clicked from an e-mail, are harder to track.

Entry Pages Your SEO Plan focuses on a favorite set of landing pages, chosen by you. But your web analytics review may show you that people are entering your site on entirely different pages than you expected. Sure, you know people are coming to the home page, but would you be shocked to learn that a big chunk of visitors are entering somewhere else, like your Site Map page? And would that leave you scrambling to improve the messaging there? We love watching this metric because it reminds us to design every page on the site as a potential landing page. Top entry pages are the queen bee pages of your site. Once you identify them, you will give them the royal treatment: optimizing, monitoring, and protecting their integrity when a site redesign threatens to change them in any significant way.

Exit Pages and Bounces Site exits are often looked at as a sign that something's gone wrong on a web page, but remember: Everyone exits your site eventually. So unless you're looking at exits during a defined linear process, like right in the middle of a shopping cart purchase, site exits alone aren't going to tell you a whole lot about how to improve your user experience.

Since exit pages (the pages from which visitors leave your site) are a metric with limited usefulness, we suggest looking at bounces instead. A bounce is defined as a visitor leaving the site after viewing just one page. If a large percentage of your site visitors are bouncing out, either you're inviting the wrong crowd to your party or there's something very unappetizing greeting them at the door!

Here are a couple tricky points you should know about bounce rates:

- When looking at pages that bounce, don't be surprised if your home page is high on the list. It's common for people to arrive at your site and immediately realize it's not what they're looking for.

- Don't always assume that a page bounce is a failure. If you have a phone number on every page, for example, then a single page visit may be all your visitors needed to accomplish their goal.

- If you've got two different domains sharing the same analytics package or your store is on a different domain than your primary website, your bounce rates may be delivering faulty info. We've seen systems where every time someone clicks to the store, it looks like they're exiting the site. That means a store purchase will look like a bounce!

With these caveats in mind, we think you'll find bounce rates one of the more useful web analytics metrics. Combined with page views (which are really the same metric a bounce rate is just a single page view), they can help you identify the best and worst keywords, referrers, and entry pages on your site.

Time on Site In July of 2007, web traffic measurement firm Nielson/NetRatings began reporting time spent on a site as one of its markers of a site's performance. If your site contains a great deal of content that displays without refreshing the page (photo slide shows, online videos, or Ajax applications might fall into this category), then measuring the time your users spend on your site could be the best way for you to understand their level of engagement.

Errors Among other things, your server will log a 404 error (“File not Found”) every time a user tries to access a nonexistent URL. This can help you find inbound or internal links that are using incorrect or out-of-date URLs. Tag-based programs, including Google Analytics, may require a workaround to show you these errors. The list of useful server stats could go on and on, but you have limited time, so we stuck with the basics.

If you already have access to your site stats through a web analytics program, congratulations! Today, you'll look through it for the information just listed. If you don't have a web analytics program in place or you only have the package that was provided by the web hosting provider (these passed muster a few years ago, but you deserve better), we're going to give you some really simple advice: Do yourself a favor and set up Google Analytics.

Consider it a pilot program: After six months with Google Analytics, you'll know loads more about your site and your organization's analytics needs, and you'll be fabulously prepared for your next analytics purchase, if needed.

With all the web analytics wisdom you gained today, you're perfectly positioned to start sorting out your online website conversion tracking tomorrow.

Measure and React

You may be thinking about your online conversions for the first time. But even for folks who have been doing it for years, it can be absurdly difficult to interpret in a meaningful way. Here are a few good ways to frame your thoughts around your conversion data:

Conversion Rates

Tied to Paid Search Bids The quickest and most satisfying use of a conversion measurement is closing the loop with pay-per-click bids. With pay-per-click advertising, every sponsored keyword has a price tag associated with it. Knowing how many conversions you're getting for your money will tell you whether any current paid search efforts are on target. A good example is the “Employment” page we discussed previously. You'd probably be distressed to find that you're paying thousands of dollars to bring job seekers to your site.

Conversion Rates Inform Organic Search Targeting

Here's a way to put your conversion tracking to good use. Using your web analytics or paid search program, discover which keywords are delivering the highest conversion rates. Are there any surprises on the list? Any that deserve their own landing pages? It's not too late to go back and add these keywords to your top-priority list. Remember that if you devote your energies to known success stories, even modest gains in traffic can mean large gains in conversion numbers.

Paths to Conversion Inform the Sales Process

You may already know that more people are buying your cheaper products than your high-priced ones. But conversion tracking can tell you exactly what path your customers followed before they made the decision to buy. Did they go straight for the low-priced goods, or did they spend time considering your expensive products first? Did they read any reviews? Examining paths to conversion gives you meaningful insight into your customers' behavior, and may even help you figure out a new way to organize your products.

Even if you don't know what to do with this information, it's important to get comfortable with looking at it. Once your learning curve evens out, you may be surprised at how easily you can find real meaning in the data.

Conversion tracking: You know you want it! Now that you've digested the basics, you can use today to discuss it with your team. Then, it's decision time: Which system will you start with?