Blogger Stats

Now out of draft and fully integrated into Blogger is their very own statistics service. So does this mean I shall get rid of the chunk of javascript that powers Google Analytics? Um well no.

The Blogger stats service runs within the main Dashboard which makes it easy to get to. You get  various tabs - Overview, Posts, Traffic Sources, and Audience. You can then pick if you want to see Now which gives you the last 2 hours of data; Day, the last 24 hours; Week, the last 168 hours; month (sic), last 30 days; or All time. You can't pick a date range yourself.

So how good is it. I checked out Traffic Sources, and Referring Sites for a month on both this and Analytics. According to Analytics my top referrer was google.co.uk; according to Blogger it was thecarloanguide.com. Um the what now? Checking all time it seems the number of hits for the month (10/8 - 8/9) was identical for all time (May-September) but didn't appear at all for the Week. So according to Blogger I had over 1900 referrals from thecarloanguide just in August that didn't get picked up from Analytics; oookay.

At least the keyword stats are comparable between the two as in the page views although annoyingly Blogger splits those up by country, browser, or OS without bothering to give an overall total on the page. Wait this has been in draft since July and not one single person thought it was a good idea to put the actual total of pageviews up? I mean I've just been using it for 5 minutes and I've spotted that flaw.

So anyway I'll keep an eye on it but Analytics still seems the better option for now.