What you watch depends on the business you’re in. Different businesses have different definitions of success, and as such, different metrics to track. They also have different user communities and competitors, meaning they need to watch the Web beyond their own sites in different ways.
Consider a search engine and an e-commerce site.
The search engine wants to show people content, serve them some advertising that’s relevant, send them on their way, and make some money for doing so. For them, it’s good when people leave—as long as they go to the right places when they do. In fact, the sooner someone leaves the search engine for a paying advertiser’s site, the better, because that visitor has found what he was looking for.
By contrast, the e-commerce site wants people to arrive (preferably without going through a search engine because they won’t have to pay for the advertising) and stay as long as possible, filling their shopping cart and buying all sorts of things beyond what they originally intended.
The operators of those sites not only track different metrics, they want different results from those metrics. And that’s just for the sites they run themselves. The retailer might care about competitors’ pricing on other sites; the search engine might want to know it has more results, or better ones, than others. Both might like to know what the world thinks of them in public forums, or whether social networks are driving significant amounts of traffic to their sites.
While every site is unique and has distinct metrics, your website probably falls into one of four main categories.
