Search Engine Analytics and Webmaster Tools
The free website tool I use the most is Google Analytics because of its comprehensive stats. It provided answers for these recent questions I had:
- Where is traffic generating from (search engine or more word of mouth)?
- Which pages are popular and should influence the website's raison d'être? Conversely, which pages are under-performing and need a revised strategy?
- Are users upgrading their web browsers such that I can drop IE6 support and/or start using HTML5 features?
- Are there enough smartphone users visiting the site that warrants building a mobile website version?
- Where are people going to when they abandon shopping carts?
- After a major change such as a promotion, new site feature, or a link from a major website, how did users respond? Increase in traffic, stayed longer on the site, additional sales?
- How is the website doing compared to last year?
You might not have a pressing need to look at stats but it is a good idea to at least verify that search engines are correctly indexing your website. With these tools, setup is quick, simple, and non-intrusive. They'll even explain the errors spiders encountered when crawling your site so you can fix them promptly.