25 May 2013

What do the numbers mean?

Do you keep an eye on your stats in Blogger?

How does this, from the Posts page (views of separate posts) -
The left column is Comments and the middle column is referred to as "View count"

relate to this, from the Overview page (pageviews during the past month)? -

Undoubtedly the pageviews, which are much higher than the number of views of posts, as far as I can see, include bots and spammers and suchlike - what can we believe about traffic to a site?

Perhaps the View Count is people who go directly to a particular post, rather than landing on the blog itself and being able to scroll down to see many posts?

I haven't been able to find clarification - have been using the wrong search terms, no doubt!

3 comments:

Jane Housham said...

This kind of thing intrigues me too, but if you look, under 'Stats', at the 'Overview' you can see exactly which posts have been attracting views. On my blog, by far the largest number of views are for an old post I did about clowns. I think there's a photo in there that's doing the rounds of the internet, or something, and so more people are seeing it than anything else I've posted. Strange.

Karen Hurrell said...

It does look counterintuitive, but it is possible if you post regularly to your blog (which I know you do).

The view figures in the list of posts are total 'all time' page views for each post. The monthly overview shows daily totals for all your posts. The latter are much bigger than the former since anyone visiting your blog will have several new posts to read, so they will add one view to each post but several views to the daily total.

Now I know that you usually publish several times a day (as I am one of the people adding to those page view stats).

Say you publish four posts in a day and on that day 30 people look at your blog and read on average eight posts each, each post would get up to an extra 30 page views but the total for the day will be 8 x 30 = 240. So it's easy to have quite a big difference between the views for each post and the daily totals.

Hope that helps
Karen

Marian Hall said...

I'm far from an expert on this but I have read that the Blogger stats do include Bots etc and that a more accurate way to measure the traffic is through Google Analytics. I followed these instructions http://jensontaylor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/using-google-analytics-with-blogger.html to set it up and now use it on my textilesnippets.blogspot.co.uk