This is very similar to Revenue Tracking, in fact revenue tracking could fall into this category, with the only difference being that revenue tracking has a dollar value associated with it. But important conversions don't always have a dollar value, for instance, your site may be a free service that is supported by advertising so every sign up is important. With conversion tracking you can keep track of how many sign ups are happening and where they are coming from in much the same way that you would do with Revenue Tracking.
Time Trends
Time Trend reports are great for determining when visitors are visiting your site and when sales are occurring. You can modify your advertising campaign schedules based on this type of information; for example, if people are most likely to make purchases in the evening after they get home from work, then you can lower your advertising expenditures during the day. Or maybe most people purchase on weekends and rarely on weekdays. As you can see, you can get a lot of beneficial information from these types of reports.
Click Paths
Click paths keep a real-time trail of your visitors as they traverse through your site. Being able to see the path that your visitors take through your site can greatly help with tuning your site to get the most out of it. Do visitors get into a loop on your product pages? Do they make it to the pages you want them to see the most, and if not, where do they go instead? Are potential buyers bailing out in your checkout process? Are there too many clicks for people to get to the information they want to see?
Click paths can answer all kinds of questions. You could do a usability study and get similar results, but you may find it hard to get your visitors to allow you to watch over their shoulders. ;-) Click paths really are the next best thing to a usability study.
Conclusion
Choosing the right web analytics service to provide you with good web analytics is one of your toughest choices. Just be sure that the service is going to give you both the statistical information and the features that you require. You will also want to make sure that the web analytics service provider is reliable and provide you with good service and support. And of course, the service should fit into your budget.
Travis Reeder is co-founder and developer of Ecommstats Web Analytics, which provides advanced web analytics services to some of the top ecommerce sites on the Internet.