What’s the difference between simply measuring page hits and views, and actually converting site visits to sales? Smart use of Web analytics.

With analytical tools, the goal is not to capture numbers – although that is important – but to have those numbers work to form a clear picture of how your customers interact with your site, and your business.

Bob Chatham, an analyst at Forrester Research, recently published a technical brief titled, "The Web Analytics To-Do List for 2004." In it, he explains the importance of using Web analytical tools to measure how visitors interact with your site and to make sure their user experience is the best it can be. Visitors who regularly meet with success on your site are far more likely to make an actual product or service purchase, so using Web analytics to measure such success is an activity that directly impacts the bottom line of your organization.

Chatham offers these 5 tips for making sure your organization is getting the most from its analytical tool investment.

1. Get your priorities straight. Every Web site has a seemingly endless list of changes and upgrades needed to tweak and enhance visitor experiences. This is where Web analytical tools can play a role, since they can help sites ferret out the critical items from the not-so-critical tasks. Chatham says fixes should balance both visitor and company goals, and Web analytics help identify and measure customers’ goals and roadblocks.

2. Don’t do analytics alone. Chatham recommends that in order to get a real "high-resolution" view into when and why visitors succeed -- or fail – with your site, you need to combine information garnered from analytical tools with customer surveys. This helps move the overall data picture from just a bare-bones hit counter to a true view of how customers interact with your site.

3. Take a scientific approach. Since Web analytics tend to "deluge" you with data, Chatham recommends sites master "experimental design." This means you should focus on your overall goals, form hypotheses about how customers interact with your site in order to achieve those goals, and then use the analytical tools to test those hypotheses.

4. Keep privacy in mind. Web analytics can easily get caught up in the uproar surrounding spam and other privacy issues. Sites need to ensure they have appropriate privacy policies and disclosures in place, Chatham says. They should also make sure they don’t share cookies with less reputable firms, he warns.

5. Leverage analytics across channels. Don’t just focus on using analytical tools to measure interactions with your Web site. Try leveraging them across other channels, such as e-mail or call centers. He says this can be done by instrumenting call center applications, voice response systems and kiosks with tags similar to those used by Web sites. The result is a more efficient data collection and centralized reporting, offering an even clearer picture of the experience all of your customers have when doing business with your organization.

For more information, visit Forrester Research here.