Ever
noticed the moment you create a new blog post, the blog stats jumps into life
within the next few hours? A successful blogger may show a blog stat count of
over 10,000 visits per month. This may inflate the blogger’s ego. However,
Google reports will show a much lower stat count regarding page views. Why do
Google reports and Blogger Stats disagree and which should the webmaster
believe?
The
Trouble with Blogger Stats
 |
| Inflated Page Count of Blogger Stats |
How
to Read Blog Stats on Google
The
novice blogger may click on traffic sources to see where these visitors are
coming from. Various sites and referring URLs may come up which might be Yahoo,
Facebook or Twitter. Others sound exotic and weird such as Vampire or Zombie
Stat. And this is where the clue lies when it comes to the inflated figures on
Blogger stats.
Avoiding
Spam Sites on Blogger
The
truth is, Blogger counts everything, whether human, yourself, bot or spam site.
This means not every page count shown on blogger stats are human. They might be
indexing sites, spiders crawling the web or spam sites. By the way, never click
on an odd sounding referring site in curiosity, as some are spam or contain a
virus. There is nothing the blogger can do from stopping these sites from crawling
your blog. Just keep writing and the better referring sites such as EHow, Bing
or the organic Google will start to crop up.
How
to Read Analytics on Google Reports
Take
a look at Google reports (different to Google analytics which is a function for manually adding a site to count page visits) to get an accurate representation of how many people
are actually visiting your site. Creating a blog will automatically configure
it within Google reports. From Blogger, click on ‘earnings’ then ‘view
dashboard’ then click ‘view reports’. If you have more than one blog or website
in Google reports, clicking on ‘sites’ will break down the page visits per
site. You can also custom the time period for analysis from the top right of
the screen (last month, last week, yesterday etc.)
How
to Find Real Page Views of your Blog
The
page views shown on Google analytics will be much smaller than on Blogger
stats, but at least this shows the cold hard truth. In my case, Google
analytics showed I was getting roughly one quarter of the visitors I believed I
had on Blogger stats. This is because Google uses cookies to differentiate real
visitors from bots and indexing sites.
How
to Use Google Analytics to Increase Google Traffic
The
best thing a blogger can do to create more page views on his blog is to simply
keep writing about what interests him. Take a look at the big picture rather
than day to day. I compared my page views between years to see if the trend
went up. Custom the time period on the top right of the Google reports screen
(I took a look at a twelve month period). You can then see if the number of
page views has gone up, down or stayed the same.
Increase
Ad Clicks with Visitor Traffic on Google
 |
| Overall Trend on Google Reports |
Because
I had believed Blogger stats page views, I thought my ads were under-performing.
How can a blogger get 300 plus page views per day and get few ad clicks? Well,
the answer lay in the fact that I simply was not getting the page views I had
believed. On average, a blogger will get one or so ad clicks per 100 page
views. Well, according to Google reports, I wasn’t getting the page views I
had believed, and therefore, would not be getting the clicks either. However,
my blog was still getting around one ad click per one hundred (human) page views – the average.
How
Blogger Stats are Misleading the Webmaster
The
beginner at blogging may believe blogger stats on face value regarding page
views, but sadly, is an inflated number count. Blogger stats counts everything,
from indexing sites to google bots crawling new pages. Don’t believe blogger
stats. Google reports (or analytics for independent webmasters) is a more realistic reflection of how many humans are
actually visiting your blog. Take a look at the big picture to find trends. If
page views are generally increasing over a few years, your blog is going in the
right direction, even if page views were not as high as the blogger had first
believed.
More Articles on Blogging
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