Over the next few weeks, we’re going to start looking at several important web analytics. Analytics are an important element in determining if your web efforts are a success.

Let’s stop right there with the word “success.” Everybody who has a presence on the web wants that presence to be successful. However, what does “success” really mean? Is it having more people visit your website every week? Is it driving more people to buy your books from your website? Is it making sure visitors to your website are interested in the media materials you post?

The answer is simple: any and all of the above, and then some. It really all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Web analytics can answer these questions. Is your aim to make sure that people who visit your website are continuing on to purchase your books? Analytics can tell you that. Analytics can even tell you how often those people visiting your site are viewing and/or downloading media materials you post to the site or from what state or country your visitors reside. Let’s say that success, for you, is appealing to people from New Orleans. Analytics can tell you how much of your visitor traffic is from the Big Easy.

This is just scratching the surface. Over the next few weeks, we will devote one blog post per week to exploring one of the key standard web analytics, because it’s important for anyone attempting to conduct business of any kind on the web to know what tools are out there to evaluate the relative success of their efforts. We’ll tell you what each analytic means, and give examples of how each analytic can be used to gauge success. We’ll even explore how analytics can be instrumental in helping improve your website.