How do you make better decisions with your website? It’s simple – Using analytical data and benchmarking. You’ll want to sign up with a service like Google Analytics (I use this on all my sites, it’s just a superb tool) and install the tracking code on all the pages on your site.
Do business as usual for the next month. Now we have a months worth of data to look at. Now you can implement that marketing campaign, put up advertising, whatever initiatives you wish to try with the website. Then a month later we can look back and compare the two sets of data, to determine if what we did worked. We benchmark against ourselves, in prior periods.
The reports show an amazing amount of data about your website and users. Not only that, but you can setup conversion goals to learn WHY users might be “abandoning the process” (leaving your site) and you can try to tweak the site to increase those conversions. Looking at the data, studying it, and really knowing it will help you make more informed decisions about what you’re doing with your website.