I wrote an article on 5 Strategies for a More Profitable Business Website awhile back that ended up getting posted on quite a few sites online.  After checking out some of the comments on one particular site, it seems like a follow up article on tracking would be a good idea, specifically focused on Google Analytics.  If you're not using Google Analytics, this free service is a powerful way to get insight into how well your site is performing.  But since there's so much information that Analytics can provide, let me give you a few tips for which metrics really matter and what you should try to improve.

Overall Traffic

There are a few key things I look at in my Analytics account.  One of the first things is also the most obvious...the amount of traffic.  It's always a good idea to know how much traffic your site is getting and any trends that might show up over time.  But since that's such an obvious one, let's quickly move on.

Bounce Rate

I like to know the overall bounce rate for my sites.  Bounce rate is a measure of how many people leave your site without clicking past the initial page they land on and is shown as a percentage.  So a 100% bounce rate means that everyone coming to your site views the initial page and then leaves.  That doesn't mean they leave immediately, just that they leave without looking around on other pages.  This is good to know, especailly when you can see what the bounce rate is for each page people land on, though typically this will be the home page.

Time on Site

Time on Site is another measure I look at.  As the name suggests, this tells you how long visitors remain on your site.  It doesn't tell you if they only viewed one page or several, so I like to look at this along with bounce rate to get an idea of how people are behaving once they get to the site.  I look at this on for both the oveall view and the time on site for each traffic source.

Traffic Sources

Another key thing I look at is the various sources of traffic.  This could be organic searches from one of the search engines, links from other sites, pay per click advertising, social bookmarking sites or visits direct visits to your site (people typing in your website address).

And more specifically, I'm not just looking for overall volume of traffic, but also how that traffic behaves on my site.  I want to see if that huge spike I got was from Stumbleupon or a sudden boost in search engine rankings.  And I want to see how long those people stayed on my site, what the bounce rate was for each traffic source, etc.  You'll quickly see that not all traffic is created equal.

For example, a lot of the traffic on some of my other sites comes from article directories and social bookmarking sites.  A lot of times, those visits from article directories are just competitors trying to figure out what you're doing and the social bookmarking visitors generally come and leave quickly (low time on site and often times, high bounce rate).  Looking at your traffic sources like this can give you insights into what's working and actually worth your time and what's probably not.

Keywords

I also like to see which keywords are brining traffic, especially from organic search.  Initially you might not see much from organic search, but as your rankings improve and more of your pages get indexed, you'll start to see long tail search terms and even some of the terms you'd really like to rank well for.  Analytics tells you which keywords brought how much traffic for a given period of time and breaks these up into lists to show free traffic and paid traffic.

New vs. Return Visitor Counts

Sometimes it's good to know how many of your visitors are new vs. returning visitors.  Initially, you'll see mostly new visitors since it's a new site.  But hopefully, you'll quickly see that some of those visitors become "returning visitors".  That can be a good indication that your site offers enough value for someone to bookmark it or remember it well enough to come back and check things out later.

Number of Visits (especially prior to sale for ecommerce sites)

I also like to look at the number of visits, especially for ecommerce sites where you can see the number of visits prior to making a purchase.  This is great info to know if you're selling items on your site and can lead you in all sorts of directions.  For example, you could create a survey to find out what people are considering before making a purchase (if you see that it's taking several visits prior to making the sale).  Or if you see that people are buying during their initial visit, perhaps your prices are too low and you should do some price testing, add an upsell or something similar.

Those are just a few of the ways you can use Google Analytics to help you get inside the head of your website visitors.  Google Analytics or similar tools can be great additions to your marketing arsenal, but you have to actually get in there and use the data they provide to really get the most value from it.