If you measure nothing else about your website, keep an eye on these 4 metrics:

1. The conversion rate of your ads. That is, for each person who clicks on one of your ads, what percentage of them take action?
2. The cost per conversion of your ads. That is, on average, how much do you pay in ad costs for each person who takes action?
3. Where prospects leave your sales funnel. If you have a sequence of pages leading up to a sale, once someone begins down that path, why do they bail out?
4. Which ads and landing pages in a split test perform better? Try two different variants of each ad and landing page, and find out which one has a higher conversion ratio.

Google Analytics is a free service that can measure all these things for you. It’s a very powerful service. Of course, that means it’s also complex. To demystify Google Analytics, start with ROI Revolution’s free email course, 7 Days to Success with Google Analytics.

Web statistics can make you feel overwhelmed. All the graphs and tables, numbers and percentages. And figuring out the difference between visitors, pages, and hits.

Unfortunately, if you want to understand web stats, reading up on the subject may just make it more confusing. Even if you understand the measurements themselves, how do you interpret them? What’s more important to maximize? Visits per day? Minutes per visit? Or pages per visit? Don’t answer. It’s a trick question. Because none of these measurements help us achieve our website goals.

It’s said that if you ask the wrong questions, you’ll always get the wrong answers. But many web consultants and business owners ask just these questions. They ask these questions, because these are the only questions they know to ask. But if we take into account our website goals, we’ll ask much better questions.

Lester Wunderman wrote, “Manufacturers, distributors and retailers, in fact all who advertise, are beginning to recognize that they must focus increasingly on making customers rather than just making sales.”

This is the essence of building your own web traffic. It’s the same as building your business. Getting repeat web visitors is the same, in concept, as getting repeat customers.

There are several methods you can use to build repeat traffic to your website. With each of these methods, to get the most out of it, you need to provide value to your visitors. A customer who feels they got a good deal from your business is more likely to buy again. And a visitor who feels they found valuable information at your website is more likely to return. And you use web copy to convert visitors into subscribers, as you might say “Come again!” to a happy customer.

Borrowing traffic is one of the most effective ways to get free traffic to your website. It is part of the great power of Web 2.0. Borrowing traffic is the PR of the web. Just as PR gets you attention from people who already have attention, borrowing gets you traffic from someone else who already has traffic.

The quickest way to get visitors to come to your site is with advertising. And the quickest way to get started in on-line advertising is to use Google AdWords. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also the quickest way to give Google a lot of money.