Reading Jakob Nielsen’s great article today, ‘Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click’, got me thinking about delivering my first few training sessions when I was with ClickTracks. The reason for this was this heading: “Unique Visitors” Must Die.

Using Web analytics just to churn out reports for management is like driving a Porsche in bumper-to-bumper traffic. You’re not putting the pedal to the metal and using it for all it’s worth.

If your site has an internal search engine, it might be time to do some mind-reading. Search keywords reveal your visitors’ intentions, which is quite possibly the best way to understand why your site succeeded or failed at meeting their needs. You’ve probably looked at the top keywords that bring visitors to your site from external search engines, but your site’s own search engine can be especially valuable -- 

Your Web-analytics solution is likely providing copious detail about customer and prospect behavior, such as number of unique visitors, site-navigation patterns and top entry pages. But are you using it to shed light on how well email-marketing campaigns are performing?