Webware review: Blogger Stats

Did you know that you can now get statistics in Blogger?  If you view your blog in Blogger in draft (http://draft.blogger.com) then you can now see a new stats tab to the right of the design and monetise tabs.

This post on the Blogger in Draft blog explains what's available - see Introducing Blogger Stats

I've been looking at my Blogger stats for my different blogs and I'm favourably impressed.  It reminds me of a cut down tidied up version of Google Analytics without any of the fuss associated with setting up a Google Analytics account for your blog and inserting the html code in the template

Geographical spread of visitors to this blog

 The scope is as follows:

1. Flexible perspectives:  Any of the different tabs can be viewed  for different timeframes - now, day, week, month and all time.  The latter is distorted due to the start date for the stats widget.
2. Overview tab - provides a neat and simple summary of traffic, popular posts, sources of traffic and where in the world it's coming from
3. Posts / Pages tab:  lists the 10 most popular posts and tells you how many pageviews they have each received.  Also indicates page views for individual static page.  I particularly like the pageviews for top posts as this gives a different perspective from one which is focused around visitors and the profile is somewhat different.
4. Traffic sources tab: This provides the top referring URLs, referring sites and the most popular keywords
5. Audience tab:  This provides a map of where visitors come from plus analyses pageviews by country, browser and operating system

This is a quick overview:

Pros

• no set-up requirements beyond switching to viewing your blog in Blogger in Draft
• nice clean well organised design
• tab access to different perspectives
• very accessible
• identifies the most popular posts by pageviews (across different timeframes)
• provides the right level of information for most people
• no need to leave your blog in order to view the stats.

Cons

• not as comprehensive as Google Analytics (but absolutely fine for most people)
• no details for individual visitors (such as you get with Statcounter)
• focuses on pageviews rather than unique visitors hence multiple visits from or page refresh by one person can inflate numbers.  Most people measure the popularity of a site by unique visitors as this is more reliable and less susceptible to distortion
• total numbers for the "all time" dimension appears to be affected by when this webware started to be used

Overall

This is a very useful addition to Blogger.  So much so that I've now made Blogger in draft my defaul view so I can keep an eye on my stats.