Have you ever gotten lost in the analytics on your website? It is easy to do. There are hundreds of reports you can pull to measure the activity on your website. Audience, users, page views, sessions, acquisition, behavior, demographics, etc. – they all are measuring and reporting key information that you can use to better market your brand. Are there some stats that rise above the rest? Yes, in fact, there is one: Conversions.

Let me explain what conversions mean by giving some historical context. Before website analytics came along, conversions used to mean someone just went from being a prospective customer to a real, bona fide customer. In other words, they bought something from your company. It was a pretty simple definition that anyone in marketing understood. This all became a bit murky when website marketing came along because its definition was broadened. It now means any action that somebody takes on your website that helps your business succeed. When you set up your analytics software, you define what actions are valuable to you and, whenever someone takes that action on your website, it is counted as a conversion.

That is a pretty wide open definition of conversions, wouldn't you say? Let’s break this down a bit. Google analytics uses Macro Conversions and Micro Conversions to help you decide what you are trying to accomplish with marketing on your website. Typically in marketing, little goals are stacked up to achieve much larger one. Let’s say I set a marketing goal: I want to get people to sign up for my e-newsletter. I might advertise it to them with an e-blast and then ask them to click through to my website and sign up. If they do so, that is considered a Micro Conversion. Now let’s say on my e-newsletter I have a landing page on my website that advertises a product I am trying to sell. After I send them my e-newsletter, I will offer a click through to that landing page and ask them to buy the product. If they do so, that is considered a Macro Conversion. The Micro was a setup for the Macro Conversion, which is where I want all of the people that come to the website to end up.

This is why conversions are the most important stat in your analytics if you are in charge of marketing. You can drive all kinds of traffic to your website to get a look at what you do. That is good for making people aware of your brand. But marketing is more than just awareness – it also has to entice people to buy your brand. I would encourage you to do two things with your analytics. First, make sure they are set up to measure what is truly important to you in reaching your goals. If you don’t have goals for your web traffic, make them. You can set more than one goal, but make sure you are assigning them correctly so they can be measured in the conversion field of your analytics software. Secondly, pay attention to your marketing efforts and the conversions you get after doing so. This will tell you a lot about your target market and give you a sense of whether you are being successful with your campaigns to accomplish your goals.

Don’t get lost in all your analytics reports. Some stats are much more important than others. Make sure conversions is at the top of the list.