Website Stats

Until you're making a profit with your website (and that includes indexing in a cost for your time), I don't recommend that you look beyond your normal website stats. They will provide you with plenty of rich information.

When you start to make a profit, you may consider getting Google Analytics, which is a FREE service and provides excellent web stats, telling you:

who's visiting
how they came in search engine/keyword, link, directory?
where they visited in your site (and more importantly, which areas are they digging deep into? Provide more areas like that and the search engines will start to reward your website)
how long they stayed
were they return visitors

...stats that are priceless, absolutely great stuff! However, when you move into another league and, let's suppose you had multiple pay-per-click campaigns or banner ads pointing towards different pages on your site, you'd probably need some split-testing stats.

Why?

Well, simply because if you know exactly what's working and what isn't, you can radically cut your advertising costs. Let's take this site and e.g. I decided to run pay-per-click campaigns advertising this page.

I could, conceivably, run campaigns with hundreds of keywords lists along the lines of:

slash your pay per click advertising costs
slash your pay-per-click advertising costs
slash your pay per click ad costs
slash your pay-per-click costs
halve your pay per click ad costs
slash banner advertising costs etc.
cheap leads etc.
turn your web stats into cash

...now, some of the ads might be pretty lame but if I can find out:

which ads are working and which aren't or
whether the ads don't make a sale but result in folks drilling into the site and bookmarking it

...then I'm in a great position, because, if my inefficient ad campaign of 100 clicks @ $0.05 ($5.00) led to, let's say, 18 return customers (who occasionally purchased one of my recommendations and/or click some Adsense) and 5 who joined my mailing list, I'm a happy man.

Without good stats to guide me, all my decisions would be predominantly guesswork and in the case above, I might well not run the inefficient campaign again and potentially miss out on a lot of cash!

There are a number of Website stats packages around, some as one-off costs, even getting up to around $1000 (any mention of Taguchi sends the price skyrocketing), with others website stats services being a monthly cost. I can't really see why you'd bother, since Google Analytics, is FREE...but it's up to you.

Here are two reviews of Google Analytics:

the first from when Google Analytics was first offered in 2005 &
the second (excellent, with 80 comments) from the Google Analytics update in 2007

One thing that stands out from both reviews is the uneasiness that some folk feel about Google Analytics having all this data about what's happening in your site. I can't really see the problem, myself, because they have access to that data about every site already, Google Analytics just enables you to have access to it!