If you believe Web Analytics is overrated and your business could succeed without Web Analytics, then you’re absolutely correct. Below are 21 reasons why you don’t Web Analytics integrated into your online campaign.

1. You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.
2. You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.
3. Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.
4. Tracking hits is perfectly sufficient.
5. Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.
6. Site overlay is overrated because you can pretty much guess which links visitors find appealing.
7. Bounce rate sounds like a make believe metric.
8. Your time is better spent elsewhere rather than crunching data in order to measure the performance of our website.
9. You love the plateau in your website’s traffic because concentrating on branded keywords is good enough.
10. Podcasts are the hippest thing, if you record they will come, so why measure the number of downloads.
11. Your development team should be adding enhancements not implementing web analytics.
12. Top Exit pages is a non-issue for your website, once visitors arrive they are going to purchase.
13. Who cares what paths visitors take or the length of their paths, as I said earlier, once they arrive, they are going to purchase.
14. Everyone understands English so it doesn’t matter what country your visitors originate from.
15. 3 words: Log File Analyzer.
16. If you leave a form up long enough someones bound to fill it out eventually.
17. Your site’s probably not going to have repeat visitors anyways because they’ll find everything they need the first time around.
18. You know that a PPC campaign’s success is completely based upon click-throughs and impressions.
19. Internal Search? That’s just there for show.
20. If you take $50,000 that you would need for an analyst and spend it on PPC you’re probably going to get better return.
21. You don’t need to track newsletter registrants because bulk email lists are very inexpensive.

If you haven’t figured it out, I am kidding. Web Analytics absolutely has to be part of your online campaign, in fact you’ll be marketing blindly without it. Let the 21 points above serve as a reminder of what kind of insight you’re missing out on without Web Analytics in place.

Web Analytics provider, StatCounter, has upgraded its free version by increasing the log file size from 100 to 500. A log file size of 500 means that StatCounter will allow web analytics users to gain insight on the last 500 visitors.

My favorite thing about StatCounter has always been its ability to report data very intuitively and in real time. I wonder if the upgrade of the free version is due to the pressure StatCounter is feeling from Google Analytics. I believe StatCounter has a long way to go if they really want to compete against Google’s free version.

Here’s what current StatCounter users have to do in order to take advantage of the upgraded log file size.

Free Members: To increase your log size, log into StatCounter and click the wrench icon beside your project. Click ‘Adjust Log Size’, and enter 500 in the box. Click ‘Adjust Project Log’ and you’re done!

Upgraded Members: To increase your log-size, log into StatCounter and click the wrench icon beside your project. Click ‘Adjust Log Size’, and increase your log by an extra 400 (your current log already includes the first free 100!). Click ‘Adjust Project Log’ and you’re done!