Studying the metrics of what you do is an especially important part of having a successful business. Without looking at the numbers you really cannot know exactly why you experienced either success or failure. You can make assumptions, but when you do not have to do that it is better to use facts to ensure that your efforts are not a waste.

 If You Cannot Measure It Does Not Exist – When you set goals, they should be something that can be expressed in numbers: clicks, page views, sign-ups, buys and so forth. You can even assign values to conversions so that Google Analytics tells you what a conversion is worth to you without you having to leave the system.

 Help You Get to Know Your Visitors – You probably set up a certain idea of your audience before you even started your business. You created marketing materials based on your ideal audience and it is worked. But can it work better? If you dig deep into your audience’s demographics (especially the people who have converted), you most certainly can.

 You will know What Content Is Most Important – When you set up analytics you can see what blog posts, articles, and other content is getting more traction. You can see views, comments, and more, which can help you judge better what type of content you need to create more of.

 Let us You Understand Top Referrers – Using the data you collect; you can find out who/what is sending the most traffic (converted traffic) to your website. This is useful because if it is one person (like an affiliate) or one website, you can give them some extra love to encourage more of the same.

 Helps You Study Your Competition – Nothing is more important outside of your visitors than your competition. You can learn a lot from your competition when you can get to know everything they are doing – including the keywords they use, the prices they charge for their products, and even their conversion rates.

 Teaches You What Works for Your Audience – When you study your numbers you can find out if the ideas you have had work or not. Some will, some will not. You can find out what works, optimize it and do more of it by looking at the data.

 Enables You to Kill Projects That Fail – You do not even have to allow projects to continue if the numbers show that they are failing all the way around. You can kill projects fast when you are doing them online. It is not liked the old days when you had to let things run their course and watch your money go down the drain.