Seth Godin yesterday echoed my philosophy on web stats. This is one of the 4 key elements that any website strategy needs. And it’s way simpler than the hype you hear in web-traffic circles. Because you should not maximize your web traffic. In fact, don’t even pay much attention to it.

Yes, you do need traffic, or else your website will do you no good. But just getting more and more traffic won’t make your website succeed. Amazon can afford to go after more and more traffic, at any cost. That’s their business model. “Please send us all your traffic so we can make lots of money.” That works for them. It fits into their business plan. You are not Amazon.

Here’s what Seth says:

Why do you have a site? What’s your goal? Is it to sell something? To receive email? To spread an idea? Whatever it is, you can probably measure it. And measure it you should. Every other piece of Analytics data is trivial compared to that one number.

Yes, you need traffic. This is also one of the 4 key elements any web strategy needs. But when you measure your website, remember the purpose of your website, to convert visitors into customers, and to convert customers into visitors. So measure conversions, and maximize conversions.

Need a push? Here are 4 key metrics Google Analytics can measure.

-TimK

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