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I sat down with Marcus Chen, who spent eight years running analytics for e-commerce sites doing seven figures monthly. He's blunt about what most people get wrong.

Stop obsessing over total traffic numbers. Marcus pulls up a dashboard showing 50,000 monthly visitors with a 0.2% conversion rate versus 5,000 visitors at 3.8%. The smaller site makes more money. Track traffic to specific landing pages that convert, not sitewide vanity metrics.

Bounce rate means nothing without context. A blog post with 80% bounce rate might be perfect if people found their answer. Check time on page and scroll depth together. Marcus showed me a client case where high bounce pages had average read times of four minutes—those visitors got what they needed.

Look at ranking distribution, not average position. An average position of 15 could mean you're stuck on page two, or it could mean half your keywords rank in the top five while others are at position 30. The difference matters for strategy. Pull the actual distribution data.

Track brand search volume separately. If your branded searches increase while non-branded stays flat, your marketing works but your SEO doesn't. Marcus exports this weekly as a leading indicator.

He spends 10 minutes daily reviewing these four things instead of drowning in 40-metric reports that tell him nothing actionable.

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