Web analytics is a very important tool for companies who are advertising on the Internet to utilize. It is used to measure the web performance data being produced by your marketing methods and shows you ways in which you can improve your visibility online. In the past, web analytics could only be used to measure traffic to your website, but with new developments in technology, it can now be used in many different aspects of advertising and web marketing alike.

Effective web analytics can help a person not only to find ways to draw focused traffic to their site in the first place through the use of highly sought keywords but can also help the Internet Marketer begin to understand why they are losing potential traffic when it arrives at their site.

Web analytics has evolved into much more than visitor "hits" counter. The new generation of Web analytics is an important resource for assisting customer relationship management, optimizing marketing, increasing sales and measuring site activities that directly affect customer behavior. Analytics reports provide information that allows managers to improve Web activities, eliminate wasted marketing efforts, target new sales customers geographically, support existing customers for repeat business and lifetime loyalty, enhance the site for more efficiency, etc. Web analytics is moving away from IT and into management, sales and marketing.

When looking at my own analytics I pay special attention to unique pageviews and unique visitors. As an Internet marketer my focus on people and how they are using the site, simple knowing how many 'hits' does not provide any actionable insight.

Clicks - indicates how many times the links on your website were clicked by visitors.
Visits - the number of individual sessions initiated by your visitors. A session is defined as a 30-minute window of time. . If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.
 

Visitors (aka. Unique Visits) - the initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors. Visitors is a metric that attempts to count unique 'people' visiting your site.

Pageview - a view of a page on your website. If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview will be recorded as well. This is a count of every page that is loaded on your website, even duplicate pages viewed during the same session.

Unique Pageviews - does not count the duplicate pageviews in one user session. This provides a truer count of the different unique pages that the visor looked. In other words, the number of sessions during witch that page was viewed one or more times.