Using web analytics is critical to verifying your online efforts are worth the cost. For many of the clients I have worked with, digging through web logs for visitor trends or biggest referring site is not even on their radar. Yes, not having at least AWStats (sorry Webalizer leaves details to be desired) is really like flying blind with your online marketing budget.

If you are in charge of online marketing for your web site - how are you going to justify a bigger budget if you don’t have the statistics to back it up? You want to prove your online marketing efforts each month are worth the cost - and be able to eliminate the under performers.

At minimum, be tracking:

• Search Terms
• Referral Sites
• Online Sales/Subscriptions/Optins

And if you are doing pay per click - watch the conversion rates like a hawk. PPC can empty your budget in no time if the loser keywords are not eliminated.

A simple look through your web analytics data can prove that buying a banner add or purchasing a link has delivered real traffic - traffic that has converted into sales. And if there is no traffic from a sponsored ad, then you’ve got the information to eliminate the cost.

There’s not a lot of detail in this post - but I’ll be doing a follow up that discusses several key features of Google’s free service, Google Analytics.