Web Analytics: A Primer

When you have a physical store, you can directly observe how customers shop. And you can make adjustments to improve sales based on your observations. It's also possible to "observe" how customers shop on your website by using web analytic software to collect valuable data. Here are a few key metrics to track that will help you optimize your website:

• Conversions -- the total number of sales divided by the number of visitors to your website
• Referrers -- the source of your website's traffic (i.e., where visitors to your site come from)
• Bounce rate -- the percentage of visitors who leave your website after visiting only one web page
• Goal path and goal abandonment -- the path visitors take from page to page on your website, which shows where sales are generated and where sales are abandoned.