The essence of web analytics is to boil down business objectives into unique actions on a web site. Its not about amount of visits, time on site, or most visited pages. When you match a desired outcome from a web site to a business goal and then devise a strategy around getting that desired outcome to happen more, by analyzing the data around that desired outcome, you’re doing web analytics.

Get enough of these and you can separate them into small objectives and large objectives where smaller ones lead to bigger ones, like it takes 10 sign-ups for every 1 sale. Then you build your marketing strategy off of these business objectives: “we need an increase of sign-ups if we are going to reach our sales goal so how can we optimize the content on the site by looking at bounce rate?” etc.

On a side note: Can the same methodology be used on optimizing your life? What is your personal life purpose and how can you boil it down into unique outcomes that you can track to measure your progress?