Blogger, Google’s blog publishing platform, has just been given a useful new feature many a Blogger user will appreciate: near real-time statistics (via Louis Gray).
Dubbed Blogger Stats, the feature is available for all non-private Blogger blogs. The only catch is you’ll only see the new ‘Stats’ tab when you go to draft.blogger.com.
On the new Stats page, you’ll see a tab that says ‘Now’, which gives Blogger users an almost real-time overview of which articles are most popular right now, and where those visitors are coming from (both in terms of source and geographical location).
The elephant in the room is of course that Google offers free, robust Web analytics software with Google Analytics that doesn’t boast real-time statistics as it only updates them every few hours. Perhaps this is a first sign of imminent changes on that front?
We love real-time stats around here (we use Chartbeat, but there’s also Clicky, Woopra and many more – and of course Twitter just acquired Web analytics startup Smallthought), so we’re wondering out loud why Google Analytics doesn’t have this feature.
Obviously, there’s no technical limitation, and from what I can gather from issues raised in forums and the Google Analytics Help Center, the company believes most users are simply not interested in seeing real-time stats rather than a good overview of 24-hour traffic and longer periods of time.
Which begs the question: if that’s really the case, why add real-time stats to Blogger?
Blogger is a blog publishing platform formerly known as Pyra Labs before Google acquired it in February 2003. Blogger blogs are mostly hosted internally with the “dot Blogspot” domain but they can also be hosted externally on a user’s own server. Blogger provides bloggers with a WYSIWYG editor that allows them to drag-and-drop widgets, change fonts and edit page elements. Also, Feedburner’s feed management tools are tightly integrated with Blogger blogs due to Google’s recent acquisition.
Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is targeted towards marketers rather than webmasters and technologists. GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. Integrated with AdWords, users can optimize online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions. Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific...
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