Where Do Customers Go and How Long Are They There
Entry and exit pages
These are the pages that people land on when they come to your site and leave from when they go somewhere else. Most websites most popular entry page is their homepage. But if you have other pages that have a high number of people entering on, you can look at those pages and make sure that they provide good access to other areas of your site. You should watch exit pages and try to figure out why they're leaving. If it's because you've solved their problem or answered their question, then great. But if they're leaving because they didn't find what they needed, then you need to figure that out and provide it for them.
Entry and exit pages often seem like a very useful metric to study, but they don't provide a lot of information you can readily use. For instance, it's hard to know why a customer is leaving a site - you could set up a survey on popular exit pages to find out why they are leaving. But many people, especially if they are frustrated, won't take the time to fill out a survey of that sort.
External clicks
If you set up tracking on your links, you can track which of the links are the most popular. This is especially useful if you have a lot of links to external sites. By tracking which links get the most clicks, you can determine what people are interested in and add that to your site.
You can also track links within your own site. This allows you to test things like the effectiveness of a link graphic or link text as well as locations of links and how long they are on a page before they are clicked. Click tracking can tell you what areas of your page are the most likely to be clicked on. Then you can put your most important links in those sections, while leaving the less important ones to other areas of the page.
Click tracking doesn't typically come with most out-of-the-box analytics packages. You often have to add some type of code to the URL or even create a URL redirection script that passes your links through a tracker as they click on them.
Paths
Paths are a very useful tool for tracking customers, especially if you have specific goals for certain areas of your website. For instance, if you want someone who lands on your product pages to ultimately purchase that product, following the path they take through the site can be useful to know if they are likely to finish at your online store. Plus, pathing can tell you where your site is difficult to understand or loses customer engagement - if most paths end on a specific page that is also an exit page, you know that there's something about that page. Either it meets their needs perfectly and they're done with your site or it's confusing and they leave for better pastures elsewhere.
Paths can be very difficult to read in a website metrics package. They are only really valuable if a lot of your visitors take the same route through the site. It can be tempting to try to follow one specific visitor through your site, but this is misleading and counter-productive.
Time on site
Some metrics programs will evaluate your visitors and then tell you how many minutes they spent on your site. This can tell you how popular certain pages are (like, are people willing to read that 10,000 word treatise you posted or do they leave after 5 seconds?) as well as how much time people spend browsing.
The problem with time on site metrics is that they are difficult to track accurately. For example, how many times have you done this: browse to a site and look around, then look at the clock and realize it's lunch time and leave, an hour later, you come back and your browser is still on that page. You might continue browsing or not. There is no easy way to know that a human is still sitting on a page reading it. Then it becomes up to the metrics provider to decide how to count that time - do they stop counting on the page before the one you went to lunch at? Or give a certain minimum number of seconds for the lunch page? Or what? Most metrics systems track this differently. You should ask your provider for specifics.
Bounces
Bounces are the pages where people didn't hit any other page on your site, just the one. You can track both which pages are popular to bounce onto as well as how many bounces you get on your site in a time period. Bounces can tell you if your site is being hit by spammers, as they will only spend a second or two on a page and do this over and over. Bounces also tell you if your site is not holding the interest of your readers. If you have a content driven site, but you also have a lot of bounces, you'll want to improve links and connections between your pages to get people to stay longer.
Search Engine Information
Search engines
You can get stats on what search engines are referring people to your Web pages, and what pages they are pointing to. This can help you decide where to focus your efforts on an SEO campaign as well as where you're having success. For instance, if you already rank well for Google, you might want to work on improving your Yahoo! or MSN ranks.
Search engine tracking is generally done by looking at the referral codes. So even if you don't have tracking software that will tell you the search engines specifically, you might be able to tease out the information from a referrer report.
Keywords
Even more useful than the search engines themselves is what keywords people are using to find your Web pages. If people are using keywords that don't really relate to that page, you know that there's an opportunity there. You can write another page that relates more directly to that new keyword phrase, and then link to it from the first page.
