#5 User Satisfaction: Learn what your visitors and site users do and do not like about your site. Using a good reporting service allows you to monitor your pages individually to see what pages are clicked on first, the most popular pages, duration of any given visitor's time viewing a page (visit duration), and what pages send your visitors off your site (exit pages).

Once you have this valuable information, you can make your site more enticing to your specific target audience and keep them at your site longer. You can tailor content for enticement, better sales, offer friendlier information, etc.

When you know for sure what does not work, eliminate it. When you know for sure what works, use it to satisfy your visitors and turn them to repeat customers!

#4 Site Function Improvement: Track and correct any issues or defects you detect within your site. Through good reporting you can monitor for trouble spots page by page. This is where your visitor's browser types, screen resolutions and operating systems become very useful information. Optimize your site to view beautifully for the types of equipment and browser versions that your visitors use. Guesswork is eliminated!

#3 Marketing Effectiveness: Improve your marketing efforts and eliminate wasted time and money. Monitoring your site statistics through a good reporting tool set allows you to see the effectiveness of your keyword work.

This is especially a money-saver for pay-per-click advertising, but just as important for no-cost search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. You can see the list of search engines and Website links that send you visitors; watch the keywords visitors are using to search for you; and see what marketing strategies are not working for you by their lack of linking traffic to your site.

#2 Work Your Business With Accuracy: Understand exactly what your target user wants in your site content, determine your business marketing needs, improve your return on investment (ROI), drive customers to your virtual front door, enhance their experience, and promote a higher rate of repeat customers. Web analytic tools give you the opportunity to "tune in" to your potential prospects and customers as never before. Today's online tools give business owners outstanding -- and instant -- advantages for management and growth, with a greater potential for direct conversion of visits to sales than offline. These are advantages any savvy business owner can not afford to ignore!

And the most basic and important reason ...

#1 Accurately and Dynamically Track Your Traffic: Bottom line is, you have a business Website. You need customers. To get customers, you have to have traffic. All your efforts to capture attention will do you no good if you can not see what works and what is a waste of time. You need to know if you are drawing the right target market to your business. What good is pulling in 15,000 people who are allergic to your product or can not use your service? You know the answer! Web analytic traffic reporting lets you focus your efforts and increase your percentage of buyers within your visitors, and make more sales.

Whether you rely on search engine traffic, press releases, pay per click advertising, banner ads or any other marketing strategy, with a good traffic reporting service, and through the use of Web analytics, you will gain untold advantages. Find new sites that can be potential business partners or affiliations, learn what your visitors want and what will make them stick to your site, track the impact of your promotions and sales leads, click back to the links that come to your site and get a reverse look at your potential customer up close. Web traffic reporting and Web analytics is a true "must have" for today's online businesses. Without this incredible site tool you are only scratching the surface of your Website's potential.

Cherie' Davidson is content and marketing manager for VisiStat.com. VisiStat is a detailed, real-time site traffic and Web analytics report service that is focused on user-friendliness and the goal to help online entrepreneurs make the most of their site marketing and search engine optimization efforts - to be a virtual "goldmine" for marketing. Learn more at http://www.VisiStat.com or write Cherie' at cherie@visistat.com