Whether you’re a decent-sized shop churning out all your own custom code or a single humanoid unit, pasty-white from lack of daylight, dressed like your favourite Jedi and living in your mum’s spare room, hopefully you’d like to be able to show your clients anything resembling a success on the websites you build for them.

Web Analytics sadly plays a backseat role to flashy things like… well, Flash… and latest .NET platforms, and stylish and exotic designs and other wow-y items sure to help seal a sale, but wouldn’t you love to design and build a site, and then be able to tell that client that you kicked so much backside at it that you’re making them heaps of money?

Get some analytics tools.

If you’re small, start small. StatCounter is great for small. And it’s FREE. You slap it in your code and you can point to it and yell excitedly at your client, “SEE? That guy that came in on that search term went here and here and here and then filled out the contact form and became a client… Score.” Details on a per-visitor level can sometimes tell you more about the mindset of your users than all the buzzwords like “Conversion Rates” and “KPIs” ever could.

If you’re bigger, Google Analytics. Its great for bigger companies/sites but its great for small ones too and did I mention it’s FREE!. Slap it in your code, figure out what you think you want to know (and please “boofhead”, not just “hits”, there’s so much more to analytics and actually working out how your site is going than “hits”) - customise a report, get it sent to you daily and point to it and yell excitedly at your client, “SEE? All those people that came in from that one place went here and here and here and filled out the contact form and 87.3% of them became clients… Mad Score.” Reporting on what you actually want to know (“How many people clicked on that new button I insisted we make for the home page, and out of them, how many did magical and wondrous things on the website?”) can help determine your next steps in the website’s evolution.

If you’re Global Dominationally Huge, the Googs still does pretty good, but by that point you’ll spend so much time figuring it all out that you won’t be able to count all the money you’re making, so you’ll have to hire someone to explain how much your website rocks.

So go get some FREE analytics tools, there’s plenty out there, and learn how to use them, it’s not hard. Find out what you’re doing right, then go tell everybody how awesome you are. Don’t be afraid to learn a little at first and just go with that, we can’t all be experts, but there’s surely enough free information out there to make you sound a bit like one.