Do You Know What Is Really Going On With Your Site?

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for web design (and SEO!)
Is anybody actually visiting my website?

That's a question that a lot of people ask themselves.  After slaving away to keep their sites polished and updated, business owners want to be able to see whether their site is actually working for them.

So what's the best way to do this?  Look at your analytics.

Through Google analytics, you can find out not only whether your site is getting visited, but a boatload of details about who is visiting it and what they're doing there.  It's kind of like 24:7 video surveillance on a store - except it's on a website.

In some ways, Google analytics are even better than constant video footage would be.  For example, you get to find out how visitors ended up at your site.  In other words, what did people type into Google that made your site pop up?  That's really important information from a search engine optimization standpoint, so that's an awesome feature of Google analytics.

You can also use Google analytics to determine your site's bounce rate.  A bounce rate basically shows whether people who visited the site peaced out right away or spent some time clicking around to different pages.  Your goal is to have a site with a low bounce rate, which would indicate that your home page is enticing people to delve deeper into your site.

And that info is just the beginning.  Do you want to know the average time your visitors spend on your site?  Do you want a map of what areas of the world your visitors live in?  Are you interested in how many new visitors vs. how many returning visitors?  Do you want to compare your traffic from one day to the next?  Google can hook you up with all of this information, and more.

Of course, the benefit of a store's video surveillance system is that it can be used to see people's faces (well, at least a grainy version of them).  So while you can actually see who visits a brick and mortar store through its video security system, you cannot see a picture of exactly who visited your website through Google analytics...

...yet.