Anyone with a website should
use metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their layout, content, offers etc if
they plan to be successful. Without knowing where the users have come from,
what pages they visit, how long they spend on each page or what calls to action
they engage in, then a site owner is significantly reduced in their ability to
make effective changes.
Think of a brick and mortar
retail store where they have different sections within the store. If they place
certain items in one corner of the store and quickly realize that nobody is
interested in those items, are they going to leave products there that don’t
sell? I doubt it. They should, and would move the merchandise around and
try new methods to attract the most attention.
Let's say your website
received 10,000 hits in one month. Simple enough, right? But wait; just
in navigating a website a person is likely to visit the same page more than
once. Maybe a single person visited your homepage several times in the course
of their visit. Okay, so 10,000 hits isn't quite accurate enough. You need to
know how many people came to your site, not just how many visits were recorded.
So it's several thousand
people. But wait, how often did a person visit? It's one thing if they came
back to the homepage multiple times in the span of an hour, but another matter
entirely if they went to the homepage the next day. How long can a
"duration of a visit," or a session, be defined?
For that matter, how much
time have people been spending on your site? Seconds? Minutes? Milliseconds? If
it's the latter, then you're being visited by search engine spiders and bots,
not people.
