Blogger FYI - What are Stats?

Looking at your Dashboard, you may notice an option labelled "Stats". And you might think: what the crack? What's that for?

Stats is a newish feature of Blogger, and allows you to see some of the behind-the-scenes numbers related to your blog traffic! There have always been third party options you could add to your blog to capture these kinds of things, but now Blogger has made it easier for all!

Click on your stats button, and the first thing I tell people to do is stop Blogger from tracking your own page views. I look at my blog a lot (like, too much), and this skews the results enough that it bugs me. Do this at each of the computers that you regularly use, and that aren't public. For example, I use the TM computer every once and awhile to update my blog, but they are also one of my biggest traffic sources (thanks Chan and KC!) so I like to track their page views!

Now that you are on this page, you can check out a lot of things related to your blog. This is the main "Stats" page and shows you a bit of everything. There are three specific areas in the stats-world.

#1. Popular posts. These are the ones that people clicked on the most.

#2. Traffic sources. These are the other sites that feed the most traffic to your blog.

#3. Audience. This shows you where your audience lives, and what kinds of browsers they use. (Not really relevant to my stuff, but it's fun to know I have a reader or two in Iran! What the!?)

You can navigate to each of those specific sections by using the bar at the top:

This will take you to another page that gives you more details in whatever area you selected.

For example...
#1. If you click on "POSTS" you can see exactly which posts were most "clicked on" over the course of the time period selected. This can give you a good picture of which types of posts are most popular (ex. DIY vs. Fashion, etc.)

It also shows you which pages on your blog people like the most. I love that readers click on "Blogs of Note" cause those are all my buddies' blogs...I hope I send some readers their way!

#2. Clicking on "TRAFFIC" will show you which sites send you the most readers (over the time period specified).

This will also show you how people found your blog...through which referring sites and through which keyword searches. I think this is the funniest thing to read and will give you interesting results depending on how silly (and specific) some of your post titles are! For the longest time "green card in my right shoe" was a big search keyword for me! (That's a That 70s Show reference...)

#3. And finally, clicking on "AUDIENCE" will show you where your traffic is coming from in the world and what browsers/computers they use. This is probably the least useful tool for me.

Time Period Stuff
There are a bunch of different ways to view your data as well, all based on period of time. This can be altered on each page, in each area (posts, traffic, audience) by clicking on this tool bar (pictured below):

Unless you have lots and lots of traffic, "DAY" is kind of a silly option! I usually just look at "WEEK" or "MONTH" for the best picture of how my blog is doing right now.

"ALL TIME" is also a really neat view! Plus it gives you the biggest numbers, therefore the biggest blog ego boost! HA!

In Conclusion...
I hope this was sort of helpful. It's kind of an area that you just need to explore on your own, but I hope this post gave you a nice starting point and made it seem less intimidating!

Right now my body is telling me You Need TO EAT LUNCH!!! so that's where I'm headed now. I brought my first Dinner Revolution leftovers and I'm quite excited!