Analytics is the doctor of your website. Imagine you have a site with a lot of traffic, but you don’t know from where they are coming, why they are coming and what they are doing to your site. Will you be able to do business?

Analytics helps us to know about the traffic and helps us to improve the quality of the traffic.

How to get analytics?

Most web servers offer free analytics service also known as logfiles. But the problem with web server analytics/ logfiles is that they are a bit complex to understand. Not many webmasters use web logfiles to know about their traffic.

Another problem with logfiles is that they offer limited data. They are also raw un-processable data. For example if you need to search for a keyword’s total number of occurrence for a given period, these logfiles will be of no help. You will have to manually do it. Its not only time consuming but very hard to do too.

How can you get a good web analytics software?

There are many web analytics software online. Some are paid and some free. I recommend Google Analytics because its free and it gives enough data for anyone to take a decision.

Why is web analytics important?

Web analytics gives you a lot of information about the traffic of your website. For example you can know the total traffic, unique traffic, total pageviews, referrers (ie. who referred the visitors to your site), keywords using which the visitors came to your site, entry pages, exit pages, total conversions etc.

Analytics is more important for people who are doing business through their website. However if you have a personal website without any business objective, you may not need analytics.

Analytics helps to take important business decisions. Let’s take an example. You have website that sells t-shirts. You sell red, blue, green and white t-shirts. For some strange reason you sell red t-shirts more than others. You want know why? So you dig into your website’s analytics.

Looking into the analytics you find that your site has come in top ranks in the search engines for the keyword “red t-shirts” because of two reasons:

1. 65% of the keywords contained “red t-shirts”.
2. 75% of traffic was from the search engines.

To check you searched for “red t-shirts” in the search engines and found that your site was ranked 3rd. You are happy. Who gave you this information? Web Analytics!

Based on what you found out, you can take a lot of good business decisions. For example make red t-shirts more, write more content related to red t-shirts to stay in the top rankings of the search engines, offer a discount on the second red t-shirt and more.

This is a small example of why analytics are important and how can they help you in your business.