I just got home from an interesting talk on corporate health management. More specifics on that later, but it matched with an email from a client.

Doctors use numbers to measure our overall and specific health, businesses have KPI’s. Webmasters, eTailers and eCommerce practioners live and die by their stats. But it’s amazing how many website owners ignore their stats.

Web logs get ignored until orders stop flowing

It’s a great quote, but it’s getting the cart before the horse. Logs give early warnings of problems and early pointers to success. Find out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats sooner than later. It’s always better to have time to plan a response before it becomes critical.

But logs in isolation are useless, we’re after trends. Your traffic should be moving in the right direction, and that traffic had better be relevant. There is not point in say 12,000 unique visitors if it’s all unrelated or marginal traffic.

And seeing how people are finding a website is as important as the bulk numbers. Is a pattern emerging for searchers? Are they looking for particular information or products that you provide, or can easily provide. If your product is on say page 18 of Google and people are willing to dig through 180 websites to find it, then look at improving your ranking, either through organic search improvement or sponsored placement.

Gratuitous plug. If you want to improve your natural placement in search engine results pages and want a consultant get in touch. You’ll be amazed at how high our techniques will get you.