Saturday 20 December 2014

Why Blogger Stats and Google Analytics Performance Reports Don’t Agree

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
When I began blogging a few years ago, I found myself checking the blogger stats and was pleased to find I was getting ‘hits’ (page views) almost immediately. For some time, I believed Blogger stats to be a representation of how many people were visiting and reading my blog posts. But I was mistaken.

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

No comments:

Post a Comment