In an ever-changing world of whirring gizmos and constant media bombardment it is hard to keep your head from spinning!  Being an online player in the world’s largest commerce stage, the internet is a daunting prospect.  One question most business owners have about their website is “How do I know if my website is being seen?”  ROI or return on investment is an important question to ask about your website, is it really bringing in all the potential clients it could?  What ways are those clients finding the site?  Investing in a website can be costly quite frankly, and money spent with nothing to show is a fear of every business owner, but what if there was a way to have more security?  Well thanks to the Google Analytics application there is!

When I first started playing around with website design I used the little page counter to track visits.  At the time that was the best metric I could get about whether my website was generating interest or not.  If I were to use an analogy at this point I would say the original counter is like the invention of the wheel, and Google Analytics was the invention of the modern car! Google, being the swell company they are, envisioned a data mining application that would allow the business owner, blogger, or web designer the ability to finally monitor all sorts of data sets.  Now instead of a little counter, there is a whole dashboard with an assortment of data to go through.  For instance not only can I get a precise visitor count, but I can receive important information about those visitors.  I can see what part of the world they are coming from, if that is not enough one can drilldown two further levels to see not only the country or state, but what specific city. One can also see unique visitors versus returning visitors and what pages they tend to look at, and for what duration.

Knowing about your visitor is nice, but what about how they got there to begin with?  Google Analytics also accounts for what words, sites, and engines brought your visitor to your door step.  As a further metric you can even see what page they tend to land on and exit from on your website.  Do you want to know if they are using a computer or mobile device?  No problem!  Google will give you that information as well!

To list every feature of the amazing tool that Google Analytics is would be far too time consuming, but needless to say it is worth checking out.  What does it mean to you the consumer?  It means that you don’t have to take shots in the dark as to what’s working and not working for your site.  With a click of a button one can see how their website is performing and where they could stand to do better.  So if you are a business owner, web designer, or blogger installing Google Analytics is the best move you could make in understanding your place in the online marketplace and how you could carve yourself a bigger slice of that market.