Introducing Blogger Stats

Posted by Staszek Paśko and Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineers

(Update 08/30: We’ve made these improvements to the Blogger Stats, based on your feedback and suggestions.)
  • Self-view exclusion: You can now exclude your own visits by clicking on “Don’t track your own pageviews” link on the Stats | Overview page. We’re also now excluding traffic coming from Blogger admin admin pages and post Preview, providing more accurate pageview data.
  • More effective bot traffic filtering. We’ve made several improvements to detect “bots” (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers) including extending our list of known “bots” to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors.
  • Internationalization. Now Blogger Stats is available in more than 40 languages.
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Although some of you use Google Analytics or other third party tools to track your blog traffic, many of you have requested an easier-to-use, fully-integrated stats feature for Blogger. We heard that, and we are excited to announce that Blogger in Draft now has built-in stats. Just go to Blogger in Draft, and you'll notice a new "Stats" tab. You don't have to install or configure anything to start benefitting from Stats.

The coolest thing about the new Blogger Stats is that it monitors and analyzes your visitor traffic in near-real-time. You can see which posts are getting the most visits and which sites are sending traffic to your blog right now. For example, if a reader shares one of your blog posts on Twitter and the post is getting lots of clicks, you will see a traffic increase in Blogger Stats almost instantly, with the particular Tweet mentioning your post being identified as the traffic source. Of course, traffic data across longer time periods (day/week/month) and all-time historical data are available as well.




There's also a lot more data that's being tracked, such as popular search keywords that send visitors to your blog, which country your visitors come from, and which web browsers they are using. Basically, with the new Stats feature, you know what's going on with your blog right now.

The new Stats feature shows all of this data in a simple, easy-to-understand graphical user interface. Since Stats are part of Blogger, you don't have to sign up for another service, or embed any code in a gadget.

Additionally, if you want the enterprise-level power and flexibility of Google Analytics, you can still use it, as outlined in this Help Center article. Note that the pageview data in Blogger Stats and in Google Analytics may not be identical, due to different collection mechanisms used. Also, Blogger Stats do not support private blogs for now.

Check out the new Stats feature now, and let us know what you think.

Better Post Preview

Posted by Jaesun Park, Software Engineer

Many of us preview our posts multiple times before we are satisfied with them for public viewing. Blogger in Draft now supports a new, improved preview feature that allows you to see how your post will actually look to your readers.

On the New Post page, click on the Preview button (this is a new button that we’ve just added), and you will see a new window open with the WYSIWYG preview of the post. This is how your blog post will appear to your readers when you hit publish, with the same format and style of your current Blogger theme.




Please note that the preview page does not automatically update as the contents of the post changes. To make sure the post looks OK after you've done further editing, you can refresh the preview page manually, or click the Preview button again.