How many of you actually get reports sent to you on a monthly basis, telling you how many people have visited your website and whether or not your goals have been met?
I'd hazard a guess and say most companies get the reports sent to them by their Internet Service Provider. I'd also hazard a guess and say most of those reports don't tell you anything about your goals!
It's no wonder you don't look at them. What can they tell you anyway that you didn't already figure out by looking at your sales data. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm a BIG advocate of measuring the data coming from your website's activities - BUT, only when that data can actually tell you something INSIGHTFUL about how you might be able to improve the performance of your site to meet your goals! And of course, this is where everyone stalls out and says, 'huh?'
Let me first disclose this fact: I am a Certified Web Analyst. 
Yes, I know - the title makes people's eyes glaze over. Let me assure you however that although the title may seem really boring (you'd think there'd be a better name for something so sexy and exciting!!) the outcomes from proper analysis, which includes insights into your customers behaviours, wants and desires (okay, maybe desires is pushing it) is nothing short of awe inspiring.
Let's pretend that you have a business selling your services.
You have a 'great' looking website and yes, you even get the reports monthly giving you lots of data in relation to your website. You see that your site is getting lots of traffic. GREAT! No, not great. Who cares? It's the completely wrong piece of data as you can't derive any insight from it. Now, if you looked at how many people were visiting your site, and then segmented them into categories, such as where they come from, how often do they visit, whether they request more information from you, what information they look at relative to the keywords they use to come to your site, well, THEN YOU HAVE SOMETHING!
You can now say that if Bob came more than once, and requested information on his third visit and that most people seem to visit multiple times before requesting info (which is a lead by the way), then a logical conclusion would be to make sure that you are giving them something new to digest when they come back in order to keep piquing their interest and get more people to request info from you (the lead, remember?). Conversely, if they sign up for something on the first visit and this is a trend with all of your visitors, well then you might as well scrap your daily content update plan as it will be a waste of time and won't be necessary. See where I am going with this?
Long story short, if you don't use the data collected by your website in a meaningful way - gaining valuable insights in order to make improvements would be one of them - then what IS the point? You might as well chalk your website up to a pretty package and mark it in the expenses category in your P&L statement because it won't be doing anything measurable and therefore, repeatable for you. And more importantly, if you are not even measuring your goals in your data, you will never be able to gain any insight as you are still collecting the wrong information.
This, my friend, is a complete tragedy.
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