Blogger Introduces Fabulous New Stats Pages

I use both Blogger and WordPress. Lately, Blogger has been adding on some great new features (static pages, improved spam filtering, template design tools) that have been closing the gap between the two platforms. One area where WordPress was still clearly ahead, though, was in its built in statistics-reporting page.

It's true there were always ways you could find out your stats for your Blogger blogs using external stats-reporting sites such as Google Analytics or my personal favorite, StatCounter. But Google Analytics is aimed at corporate users, and for a small blogger the amount of information, and the amount of drilling down through pages you need to do to get at that information, can be overwhelming. Even StatCounter, which is a lot more user-friendly, can be overkill when all you want is to be able to see an overview of your stats in a quick glance.

Enter the new Blogger Stats, which Blogger unveiled on August 30, 2010. Like WordPress's internal stats feature, these are built right into the back end of your blog, and you can get to them from your Dashboard. They have some features that will be familiar to Google Analytics users (the map on the first page sure looks familiar!), but they are presented in a far more visually-appealing and user-friendly way.

The stats are spread over four pages. The info is designed to be taken in at a glance, and yet it contains all the info that a non-corporate blogger would want, in both list and graphic forms, including breakdowns on traffic by posts, referrers, and keywords. You can switch reporting periods -- between now / day / week / month / all time -- at the click of a button.

Blogger has really outdone itself this time. They've created something that is clear enough to be understood instantly by new bloggers, yet contains enough information to keep stats junkies like myself happily clicking on the "refresh" button. Definitely check it out.