Looking for relevancy with this poll. I use analytics all the time to shape what I write about, and how best to promote our services.

Using web analytics to measure and monetize your websites
How do you measure the success of your website? Is it an increase in link popularity, search engine results pages (SERPS), hits per day, unique visitors, pages viewed, length of time on your site, conversions – or what? What keywords are visitors entering into search engines to find your site?

Are you actively managing your websites?
In order to manage anything, you need some benchmarks to measure against. Web analytics provide those benchmarks. Analytics are indicators that reflect the potential of your website. As Internet professionals, we all know that we can’t manage what we can’t measure, and that goes to say, you can’t monetize it either.

How would you know if your site is underperforming?
Is it as simple as tracking unique visitors or page views? Not really. There can be an endless number of other performance indicators that define and reflect the success, or lack thereof, of a particular campaign. Are you sending out direct mail? Doing email broadcasts? Advertising in print media? Running pay per click (PPC) ads? Are these tied to your website? If you’re a solutions provider, analytics analysis helps both you and your customers by defining opportunities.

Knowing how a visitor arrived at your website, when they arrived and what they did on your site is invaluable. Aligning that data should define the scope of future marketing campaigns.

What’s important to your organization?
This all starts with what’s important to you. Tie that in to your analytics metrics. Decide what key indicators best align with the objectives of your campaigns. Come up with a list of a few basic indicators that will reflect the most insight. One key indicator could be – how many visitors does it take to achieve your goal? If that goal is for visitors to purchase product directly from your website, conversion factors are important measurements. If your goal is to generate leads or brand awareness, would poor page design or navigation hurt? Landing pages are immensely important, especially those that draw the most traffic to your site via keywords or extended keyword phrases.

Tweaking your website
What typically happens when a visitor first lands on your website – first impressions? If you draw 100 unique visitors to your main landing page daily, but only 2 click through to your shopping cart, could tweaking your landing page improve your response rates, and ultimately the number of conversions?

Are some pages on your website not attracting visitors at all? If not, it’s probably time to update those pages. Likewise, if viewers are highly engaged in a specific content area of your website, would linking other parts of your site to that content help?

My recommendation
Start with keyword analysis. Enter the keyword or extended keyword phrases that attract the most visitors to your site. Take notice of the results pages, specifically your competitors’ sites. If their sites rank higher in SERPS than yours, what is different between the sites? Is it their content? Their navigation? Their meta tags? Displaying higher in search engine results pages dramatically improves website performance. Take that information and your analytics analysis – to shape and redefine your site for success.

i dont find any benefit of using analytics as i am using google analytics

This post deserves an award.

Yes it does. I am just pondering what could be the appropriate prize...

I vote it... um... something.

So Mudassirjaved, what types of metrics do you extract from google analytics that demonstrate value to your business?

We're currently not using anything other than awstats, but I'm working on my own analytics script which I'll have finished soon enough, with a few nice features to hopefully set it apart.

It'll be open source once finished & released, of course.

Use Google Analytics, this is free and one of the better options.

Google analytics works well especially when it comes to tracking of orders, referring sites, conversion etc.

It's excelent to know referring sites and keywords

I think not, maybe just enough to see if your growing and doing the right thing and what keywords you can target.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool to use, especially for the larger business companies evaluating their web traffic statistics on a regular basis. Although receiving traffic from all international visitors could be great, but many times the sales and web leads originated locally would lead to sales and better results and since the Analytics would tell of the geographic and locality, so it is really invaluable.

It's really a great tool if your using the other marketing tools with google.

Use Google Analytics, Plus JoomlsStats on Joomla sites

yea, we use a combo of google analytics and idev affiliate to track the referring urls and which ones make the sale

but the most important thing is to find out whats working and scale up on those things