Dear BizBest: The competition is eating my lunch when it comes to Web site sales. Customers say we have good products and outstanding service, and that our site looks great. But I just don’t have a feel for what’s wrong — or right — with our site. How can we better tune in to what’s happening with our site? — Web-Wacked

Dear Web-Wacked: Online competition is fierce, and becoming more intense all the time, so it’s not enough for a small business to simply have a nice-looking Web site. You need something called “Web analytics” — a fancy name for software and systems that will tell you (among many other things) what customers are doing, or not doing, on your site. Monitoring your Web site activity is vital with buyers moving more and more online. You need to know what’s working and what’s not. Web analysis software can measure what’s happening on your site six ways to Sunday. For example, it can tell you:

• How many people have visited your site.
• How many of those are “unique” visitors, which means they are separate individuals and not just the same person visiting more than once.
• How those visitors came to your site, either directly or by clicking a link.
• How long they stayed at the site and what pages they looked at.
• Which search-engine key words or phrases brought people to your site and which search engines they came from. This can help you make the most of your search-engine ads.
• Some Web site analyzers will give you flashy 3-D charts and graphs of site activity and will even tell you which city visitors are from, allowing you to measure the effects of local marketing campaigns.
• The software can tell you if all of the pages and features on your site are working. Without software monitoring of your site, you might have to wait for customers to tell you something’s wrong.
• Detailed information about most active days or times of day, along with files downloaded, entry and exit pages and the paths visitors took when they were at your site.
• Web analysis packages can help you measure and improve the performance of your e-mail marketing efforts.
• Some software will even track stolen-object statistics on images and files on your site that have been appropriated by others.

With this information in hand, you can get a grip on what parts of your site are popular, what parts are being avoided and when or where visitors are bailing out. And that can give you an idea of where you may need to make changes in your site and the experience it offers to customers and prospects.

Special dashboards will combine reports on a single screen for your review, and “traffic drivers” can identify which marketing initiatives are paying off by driving customers to your site.

Gathering and using this Web site data can literally make or break a business that’s facing strong competition in the e-commerce arena. The more information you have about your site, the better you can run your business.

Web analysis software prices vary widely, but almost any business can find something affordable. Prices start under $100 and move to the thousands for increasingly sophisticated programs.

Once you have data on your site, it may be time for action. If you have high visitor counts but you aren’t converting very many to paid customers, you may want to rewrite, rearrange or redesign portions of the site.

Webtrends from NetIQ has become one of the most popular Web analysis products for small business. This software can help you improve your online marketing efforts and make more sales. Visit www.webtrends.com for details on product variations and add-ons.

NetCommerce from NetSuite is another popular Web analysis software package for small business. Visit www.netsuite.com.

Nihuo Web Log Analyzer uses Web logs to provide you with key site analytics. Costs just $99 for a single-user license. Visit www.loganalyzer.net. A free trial version is available at the site.

A few other Web analysis packages to consider include: ClickTracks (www.clicktracks.com); NetTracker from Sane Solutions (www.sane.com), recently acquired by Unica Corp.; and StatCounter (www.statcounter.com), a free Web site monitor.

Daniel Kehrer (dan@bizbest.com) is founder of BizBest (www.bizbest.com), which publishes “The 100 Best Resources for Small Business.”

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