Web statistics can make you feel overwhelmed. All the graphs and tables, numbers and percentages. And figuring out the difference between visitors, pages, and hits.

Unfortunately, if you want to understand web stats, reading up on the subject may just make it more confusing. Even if you understand the measurements themselves, how do you interpret them? What’s more important to maximize? Visits per day? Minutes per visit? Or pages per visit? Don’t answer. It’s a trick question. Because none of these measurements help us achieve our website goals.

It’s said that if you ask the wrong questions, you’ll always get the wrong answers. But many web consultants and business owners ask just these questions. They ask these questions, because these are the only questions they know to ask. But if we take into account our website goals, we’ll ask much better questions.

The goal of a small-business website is to convert visitors into customers, and to convert customers into visitors. The key word here is convert. If we measure conversions, we’ll maximize our goals. Conversions are what matters. How easy is it to convert visitors into customers? Customers into visitors? How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? How much business on average will that customer bring us?

So here are the kinds of statistics we need to measure:

• Of all the people who search Google for a given keyword and click on a given AdWords ad, what percentage of them sign up to our email list?
• How much on average do we have to pay to get each of these email subscribers?
• Of the subscribers on our email list, what percentage of them will respond to an offer?
• Of all the subscribers who respond to an offer, what percentage of them will become premium customers?
• If we try two different ads, all else being equal, which one gives us more subscribers?
• If we try two different landing pages, all else being equal, which one gives us more subscribers?

As it turns out, these are statistics that direct-response marketers have been measuring for over a century, long before there was an Internet. They’re the same metrics Claude Hopkins advocated in his classic book Scientific Advertising. Back in the day, they just measured in terms of magazine ads and direct-mail pieces. Now we measure in terms of web visits. Different technology, but the same methodology.