I have been using Google analytics for my blog (added as a "gadget") from when I started it (May 2009).

Suddenly there was a "stats" tab available, but I missed when it started.

Now, when I compare the number of hits registered in Analytics with the number of hits in "blogger stats", the number of hits in blogger is always higher than the number on Analytics. Anybody else see this? Can it be that I added analytics in the wrong place?

Today I see another interesting difference: on my other blog (which has maybe 10 hits per week), on blogger stats it says I have had 9 hits from the US las week - but analytics report NO hits from US. How can I understand this?

Comments

Sat, 02/05/2011 - 22:58

tien (not verified)

They are probably counting slightly different things.  I wondered about this myself, as my Wordpress plugin gives me slightly different numbers than Google Analytics.  I did a google search for blogger and it looks like blogger counts "bots" (automated programs sent out to crawl the Web) and Google Analytics does not: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=5c8a1286b38534c7&hl=en  Bots can visit a page many times a day, artificially inflating the numbers.

Also, I don't know about Blogger, but Wordpress doesn't count your own visits to your blog (assuming you are logged in), which is another potential source of differences.

By the way, the number of "hits" to a blog doesn't actually represent the total number of readers.  A lot of people read blogs in aggregator feeds like Google Reader, etc. - the Google 'bot collects your blog content every so often and displays it to them in the reader, but since automated services don't count in statistics, you could have thousands of Google Reader fans reading your blog and it wouldn't show up in your statistics. (I think I have about seventy Google reader users on my blog, for example, though it's been awhile since I looked at my web access logs.)

Blogger, though, being Google, very likely has some way to figure out how many people are reading your site through feed aggregators - I just don't know what, since I don't use Blogger.

Anyway, I hope that was at least a little bit helpful...?

Tien

Sun, 02/06/2011 - 10:52

kerstinfroberg

You can ask Blogger not to count yourself, but I doubt that it works quite as it should...

However, if "in time" (blogger stats only show so many (10, I think) referring URLs - anyway, I think it counts Google Reader hits.

At the moment I'm most confused by the US hits... Hm. Come to think of it, can I perhaps ask some of you to visit Livet i Bergdala, just so I can see what happens?

Sun, 02/06/2011 - 20:42

laurafry

Just clicked on your link so you should see a Canadian visitor?

Cheers,

Laura