August 6, 2011

Know Your "Stats"

Did you know that your Blogger blog has a built-in feature that keeps track of all kinds of information for you ?  I didn't know this until I was trying to find out how to add a widget/gadget that would count individual views on each post I was doing. 

At first when I was looking on the Blogger forums about where to find one, etc., all I saw were suggestions of other websites that would put a "free" post view counter on your blog.  When I went to those websites, I realized that in exchange for putting a "free" counter on my blog, they would be allowed to put ads there.
Nothing's wrong with having ads on your blog site but I would like to have control of what ads are on there and with a "free" counter I would be giving that up. 

I went back to the Blogger forums and looked some more.  I noticed that one poster had said that she wanted more information than was provided by the "Stats" tab on her blog dashboard.  "Huh?" I had seen the tab but never even clicked over to it. 

I may be the only Blogger that didn't know about this but it is wonderful!  It is like having a little statistician living in your blog
constantly compiling information.  By clicking on different time frames, you can see traffic on your blog broken down into as small as the last 3 hours or as big as since your blog began.

Before I knew about the "stats" tab, I could see total number of times my entire blog had been viewed since I started it in March at the bottom of the pages but I also wanted to know how many times each individual post had been viewed.  The "stats" tab has all that information and so much more.
I will be the first to admit that I am a Computer Dummy and I do not know how to do a "screen capture" except to take an actual picture with my camera to capture an image of my computer screen.  My husband tried to tell me how to do a screen capture but I got "brain strain" after the first 30 seconds of his explanation and my brain shut down for the rest of the time he was talking.  I also do not know how to download pictures that I take for my blog to the computer...he does that for me.  When I got embarrassed about how my blog looked with the standard issue blog template and decided to try to design a background myself, it took me a month of free time to get it close to what I had in mind.  I would not let myself do a blog post until I got the new template.  You can see on the graph how the traffic on my blog dropped during that time.

If you already know about the "Stats" tab, feel free to leave by clicking out...the rest of this post will be boring (maybe even irritating) to you.  Here is a little tour around my "Stats" page to show you all the good info you can glean from it.  Some of you get more views in a day than I have gotten in five months but the type of things it tells you are the same.  The statistics of your blog can help you know how to increase viewership of those blog posts that you work so hard on.

Here is a weekly view:
This is basically the last week in July when I did these low-tech screen captures. You can see under the column "Posts" the stats tell me that my starfish post was my highest viewed post that week.  It was my newest post and the one that I was "taking to blog parties" to try to increase viewership of it.  My  DIY coral post had been #1 the week before but dropped to #2 in viewership.

This is a monthly view:
I am not a very prolific blogger.  I'm doing good to get out more than one post a week.  This monthly graph is interesting to me because I had two "firsts" and I can see on my monthly stat graph how they influenced traffic on my blog.  The first "first" was that a post I did on a spoon wreath was posted on Pinterest by another blogger and re-pinned around quite a bit on that site.  The bigger "first" was that Sherry at ""No Minimalist Here" was gracious to feature my next post ( DIY coral) and some photos of my house on her weekly "Open House Party" on July 27th.  She has so many followers and quite a few of them came over to my blog to see the coral post at her suggestion.  I also can see under "Traffic Sources" that popular bloggers Marty at "Stroll Thru Life" (she hosts Table Top Tuesday party) and Pat at " Savvy Southern Style" (she hosts Wow Us Wednesdays party) have given me opportunities for exposure by participating in their parties.  When I click on "More" on "Traffic Sources", it tells me what other places my blog's viewers are coming from.  This info lets you know which blog parties you better not be late for!  Another party that hs been so helpful to me and other "newbies" (but was not on the screen at the moment I took that photo) is Debbie from "Debbie Doos Blabbing and Blogging" who hosts the "Newbie Party" every week.

 A daily graph shows about what you would expect in terms of times of day you get the most traffic on your blog:

The "Now" overview shows you what happened in the last three hours in terms of traffic: 
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I had recently joined Sherry's newest "Open House Party" with a new post as well as Sommer's "V.I.P."  blog party at  "Designer Garden " and Leigh's "Thrifty Thursday" at "Blogeritaville" so the "Traffic Source" on the stats page tells me that I am getting views from those parties.  Another thing that I am happy to see on my stats page is that older posts are still getting "views" due to the Linky tool "You Might Also Like" widget/gadget (I don't know the difference) that I put on my page.  I just love that device and it is VERY EASY to install...you should add it if you don't already have it.  The stats tab also encourages me that even if I am not getting a lot of "comments", that on average about ten times more people SEE the post than actually comment on it. 

You might be a worldwide sensation and not even know it:
In the "Audience" column you can see where in the world most of your blog's viewers live.  If you click on the "More" button, it breaks it down by country for you by numbers.  Also on this "screen capture photo" I want to point out the button that you can click "Don't Count Your Own Pageviews" that tells your little statistician to not count YOUR clicks to your post in the view count.  I didn't tell mine not to count me.

I mostly looked at the "Overview" tab but there is also the "Post" tab (gives more detailed info on pageviews for individual posts), "Traffic Sources" (which tells you how folks arrived to your blog divided by URLs and websites) and "Audience" (which lists viewers by Browsers and Operating Systems).  Those last two tabs are too advanced for me...invokes  "brain strain" again.

3 comments

  1. Hi Gayle, I am not the most computer literate blogger out there...by a long shot. I do learn how to do something new almost every week and other bloggers have been kind to help me along the way. I enjoy checking out the stats and seeing where my readers come from and which post get the most exposure. Thanks for the mention and I am happy to see that my post sent some new readers your way.
    xo,
    Sherry

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  2. Hello, I am very glad that I found your page. Yahoo! I found this when I found something else. Anyway, here I am. Thanks for the great input and detailed explanation. Interesting blog (I love the theme / layout too), I don't have time to go through all of them right now, but I saved them and added them to my rss feed. good job please. And if anyone here interested to get these apps, download and play infinity kingdom - free on emulatorpc and also this download my cafe on games.lol Thank you


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