Matt Cutts, one of the few Googlers with a public blog, has made several pieces of his search stats for 2006 publicly available.  While the stats themselves might be of interest to some, that's not exactly the point of me even mentioning his post.  I'm going to ask a question but I want you to think for a minute before you answer:

What can you learn from reading Matt Cutts' post?

If your answer had anything at all to do with Mr. Cutts' blog, that's not the answer I was looking for.

That blog post is a prime example of something that every single website owner out there should be doing.  I check my analytics stats regularly through the week.  Not only should you be doing what Cutts is doing, but you should be doing it frequently.  Look at what he was able to discover from a simple analysis of his analytics data:

• Visitors and pageviews
• Popular posts
• Popular browsers
• Sources of traffic
• International visits
• Top keywords
• So much more…

Visitors and pageviews are nice to know because they show you when things are working and when they're not.  A decline in visitors and pageviews might mean a change is in order.  If you make changes and those numbers fall, it tells you the change was not for the better.  Knowing what your most popular content is can also help plan future content.  If you find out, for example, that your three most popular pages of information have to do with cats, cat toys, and tigers, it would be fairly safe to assume that you need to add more feline content.  This stuff is crucial for planning.

Cutts discovered something about his traffic from this analysis, too.  Search engines, he said, aren't the only sources of good traffic.  He lists a whole host of non-search related sites that have sent literally thousands of visitors to his blog.  Knowing those sources of information can help you maximize your marketing efforts.  They can help you plan where to expose your site to.  If you get a lot of traffic for a couple of forums, maybe you need to spread the word through a few more forums to see if the trend sticks.

International visits and keywords can help you determine what to write about and who to write it for.  If a large portion of your traffic is coming from another country it might not be a bad idea to make your site more accessible to visitors from that country.  And if they're finding your site by searching for "furry animals with claws that like string" you know that you need to invest some money into keyword advertising outside of the word "cat".

So like I said before, the stats on the post are interesting enough.  But it's the process that Cutts goes through that's so much more valuable.  Give the post a read for a great example of analytical analysis and then sit down and do the same thing yourself.  You might find out something that you never could have planned for.  Surprise analytic results are often great sources of future growth.