In the early days of web development, business owners had learned the very expensive lesson that a Web site with no visitors is of little value. Once the business owner learned that methods could be utilized to increase their visibility through search engine optimization, it then became apparent that the traffic that really benefited them, was "targeted traffic." It only made sense that if you were selling a solution, the person who will buy the solution are the ones experiencing a problem or challenge. It also became obvious that the best products and services to sell online were niche or specialized markets. Large volumes of "general visitors" (general volume traffic) may have looked nice on a statistics report but only the truly "targeted visitors" (target traffic) were usually the visitors making purchases or doing business at the Web site.
One thing that has always disturbed me about "traditional" reporting software was that it did not differentiate between rankings on one engine versus rankings on another engine. For example, we get much more traffic to this site from Google than we do from Altavista. Therefore our Google rankings are "worth" more than our Altavista rankings. About 10 times more.
You would not know this using traditional search engine ranking reporting software.