A while ago, I installed Google Analytics on my website. However, there were some problems with the configuration, so I never went back and checked it, until today. A bunch of interesting things jumped out at me on my first reading of the Google Analytics. According to Google, the top source of my visitors is EntreCard, making up about 50% of my traffic. Coming in second was Google searches making up 17% of my traffic. 13% of my traffic came directly. Blogexplosion, Twitter, Yahoo, BlogCatalog and Facebook were the other major sources.

My overall bounce rate was 87%. All of my Search Engine Optimization friends are likely to say uh-oh when they see a number like that and roll their eyes. However, I think people may be looking at bounce rates wrong. Bounce rates are the number of times people come and look at a single page, and then leave without looking at other pages.

If you are a company trying to sell product online, or if you are a candidate hoping voters will spend time learning about you and getting involved in your campaign, your bounce rate can be very important, especially if you have a splash page.

Yet if you are a blogger, a high bounce rate may not be bad at all. People come, read your blog post, and move on to whatever they are looking for next. 92% of my traffic from EntreCard bounces off to the next site. Actually, I don’t view that as bad at all. It means that 8% of the people who visit the site via EntreCard spend time to read other posts. People coming from Google or Yahoo bounce about 80% of the time. Twitter is giving me a bounce rate of 84% and Facebook is at an astoundingly low 67% bounce rate.

To me, what is more important is how much time do people spend reading material on my site. Interestingly enough, people coming from BlogCatalog lead the ranks in average time on the site, at over 2 minutes. The overall average is just under a minute. BlogExplosion comes in with the lowest average time, of just 11 seconds. I may have to rethink my use of BlogExplosion. EntreCard does well enough with the average time of 36 seconds.

Perhaps, this is in part because I’m not on any of those speed dropping lists. EntreCard speed droppers talk about trying to drop 300 cards in fifteen minutes. That works out to be three seconds per visit. Canny Granny commented in one of those discussions about how she likes to actually read the blogs that she visits. I imagine she puts a lot of time into her writing and likewise hopes that people spend time reading what she writes.

There are a lot of good reasons to spend time reading blogs that you through EntreCard. They provide a great snapshot into life. BlueStem Winery has a stunning picture and story of their son and daugher-in-law’s house which was hit by a tornado. A Changing Life has pictures of flooding, and My Interesting Files has remarkable photographs by a wedding photographer in China during the earthquake.

Yeah, you can measure website traffic in terms of visits, bounce rates, and how long people spend on a page, but these metrics pale compared to moments of real life as they get captured in blogs.

It seems like Pisio got that part of my interest in blogs in their review of Orient Lodge. If I spent a little more time on the general layout of my page, in part following Pisio’s suggestions, I could perhaps decrease my bounce rate a little bit. I might get around to that some day, but right now, my writing is more important.