Last week, I talked about five ways to increase visitor traffic to your website, and one of those items was:

"Pay attention to your traffic. Do you know how many people are even visiting your site? Be sure you know how to find and understand your site's traffic logs. And if you don't know, then find out... "

But here's the thing, there is a lot of useful information buried in your web stats, but most people just don't understand how to interpret them properly. I've said for years that too many people apply "fuzzy math" to their hit reports, that the promise of web analytics is a "twisted science." Why?  Because simply put, too often gathering analytics is about impressing the boss, and not making sound business decisions.

So, don't make the same mistake, take the time to understand what your hits are telling you in context with what you really want to know. A million hits to one site can mean something completely different to another; and a million hits don't mean a thing if you can't correlate them to some other useful metric - like say sales!

-- Mike