Whether you’re tracking your online business marketing strategy through good ol’ Google Analytics, or you’re paying for one of those slick and pretty SEO analytics software companies to track everything for you, it’s important to know where that line in the sand is for your website business. In other words, what are the metrics you actually want to track, and how do you want to analyze them?

As far as Internet businesses go, each one is going to have a different standard for online success. Some people feel that the number of “fans” they have on their social media outlets is a fair indicator of their target audience. What it boils down to, especially if you’re an online business and trying to sell a service or product, is the money. If there isn’t a substantial profit coming from investing in your online presence, then it might not be worth sinking a ton of money into the web effort.

Luckily, if you have the patience (and legal clearance) to put tracking pixels on your website, you can see the behavior of visitors to your homepage, and see if their clicking patterns yields to a sale. If your company doesn’t sell anything, then you can analyze their click through patterns to see if they were finally directed to the area they needed to be (this is valuable for websites of nonprofit agencies, who don’t sell a product, but are competing to be a high-traffic site for information seekers).

When you sit down to figure out what are the analytics that matter to you, then you should figure out the best way to find those numbers and translate them into a profit or loss. After that, the biggest, but most-important, nuisance of search engine marketing strategy is gone.