Every nonprofit nerd wants to increase the number of people visiting their website. But you shouldn’t sweat small visitor numbers. Here are three reasons why.

1. Only some people want what you’re offering. Seriously. There are only so many donors out there, only so many prospective clients, only so many people who want to get involved with your organization. What you want is to be attracting enough people who fit with your goals and your charter.

2. You want to look for patterns. Are people coming back to your site? Are they from the right geographic area? Is there a weekly/daily traffic peak? If there is a peak, you should consider building your promotions plan around the natural traffic spike – there is probably a reason people visit your site at those times.

3. Search performance is vital – but so is the follow through. Are you getting hits on your donation page but few donations? Chances are, your web donation software is problematic. Are people visiting the homepage but going no further? That’s bad news, too – you might need a redesign or more live content.

The solution is to develop good analytics goals that work in with the real-world goals of your organization, and to track them intelligently.

Here’s a quick guide to web analytics for nonprofits.