In this post we'll talk about site metrics a little bit. Don't get intimidated by this if you're not too familiar with the term. It simply means statistics that reveal what actions your visitors are taking when they get to your site. There are a lot of analysis programs on the market that produce the statistics to help you adjust your site.
For metrics (statistics) to be helpful, you first need to a system in place to record what the metrics are telling you. You need to record what is happening consistently so that the statistics can tell you a story and from that story you make the adjustments to your site.
The whole idea of metrics is to get the visitor to take the action you want them to take. It's not enought to simply identify what is happening and what the visitors are doing, but then you must respons quickly to take care of the problems that are limiting the desired actions you want them to take.
What you are trying to do over the long-term is to enhance the usability of your site through measuring actions, adjusting your site, then measuring and adjusting your site again. It's a continuous process that you must constantly do.
You are looking for visitor behaviors that show you what it is they dislike doing on your site. They take or don't take actions for a very specific reason. Metrics reveals the problem, but experimentation and measuring are what take care of the problem.
The key is to make sure you're measuring everything that a visitor could possibly do on the site. This is one of the major differences between those that are extraordinarily successful online and those that barely make it.
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