"Say you want to find every page on your site that received zero visitors from organic search in the past 2 years," says Ian Lurie at the Conversation Marketing blog. "That's a useful statistic: Those pages may be invisible to search engines, or they may be really poorly optimized."

You may be out of luck, however, if you deleted your server's "redundant" log files after implementing Google Analytics. Why? Here are a few possibilities:

• You haven't been using Google Analytics for the two-year period you want to examine.
• It hasn't been properly configured to capture the information you need.
• You don't fully trust its organic click detection.

According to Lurie, there are additional reasons to maintain your log files as a fallback. For example:

• When switching from one analytics platform to another, different methods of measurement might produce numbers that seem to come from left field. "Analyze the log files, instead," says Lurie, "and you can get a consistent view of traffic that spans both the old and the new analytics packages. Problem solved."
• If you hire a new agency, a bitter ex-vendor might "accidentally" delete your data from a Google Analytics account to which it has access.

The Po!nt: "Don't. Delete. Your. Log. Files," says Lurie. Saving the information takes little effort, and it's more than worth it.

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