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
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| Geographical spread of visitors to this blog |
- 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.
- Overview tab - provides a neat and simple summary of traffic, popular posts, sources of traffic and where in the world it's coming from
- 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.
- Traffic sources tab: This provides the top referring URLs, referring sites and the most popular keywords
- Audience tab: This provides a map of where visitors come from plus analyses pageviews by country, browser and operating system
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.
- 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
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.
4 comments:
As a new blogger who had been wondering how to find out about stats a huge thanks for pointing this out. You have saved me soooooo much time, head scratching and frustration at wading through jargon. Thank you for sharing the knowledge I hope you are enjoying the bank holiday.
Thanks Lisa
Blogger stats are inaccurate. I use two independent stat counters (performancing metrics and sitemeter) and their numbers match yet are different from the stats that blogger provides.
Stats count what they set out to count. Stats can choose to count different things or in different ways. A discrepancy doesn't make stats wrong - it just means they got counted differently.
My own personal perspective is always to treat stats as an indicator and a tin-opener - they provide a good start to understanding what is going on. However we often need to dig deeper to find out what's really happening. I like having a range of different stats BECAUSE they don't count in different ways
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