14 DAY TRIAL // As any self-respecting blogger will tell you, visitor stats are a big part of the thrill of publishing online. Even the most blasé bloggers can’t stop checking in on the stats at least once in a while, which would explain the prevalence of traffic tracking tools catering specifically to bloggers. And if you’re really serious about it you can opt for Google Analytics, the free tool Google provides. Now you have another choice, also from Google, analytics built into Blogger.
“[M]any of you have requested an easier-to-use, fully-integrated stats feature for Blogger. We heard that, and we are excited to announce that Blogger in Draft now has built-in stats. Just go to Blogger in Draft, and you'll notice a new ‘Stats’ tab. You don't have to install or configure anything to start benefiting from Stats,” Staszek Paśko and Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineers at Google, wrote.
The feature is still in testing, which is why it’s being introduced to Blogger in Draft, a sort of Google Labs equivalent for the blogging service. It’s a fully featured tool, enabling users to see which posts are the most popular at any given time, where their visitors are coming from and the traffic numbers grouped by days, weeks and so on.
If you’ve ever used an analytics tool before you’ll be familiar with most of the features and the Stats page is remarkably complete for built-in solution. In the short term it’s probably going to give analytics services catering to novice bloggers a run for their money.
But the feature also packs a very, very interesting secret weapon: real-time stats. All of the data, visitors, most popular posts and so on, is being delivered in near real time so you can track how your latest post is doing as soon as it’s published.
There are other analytics services that provide real-time stats but one notable exception is Google Analytics which only refreshes the data every few hours. It may be easier to implement the feature for Blogger, since it has full, direct access to the traffic data, but this may be an indication that Google is considering adding the feature to Analytics as well.