Friday night, Google released a new feature that allows Blogger bloggers to access near real-time statistics on their Blogger blogs. The new Stats feature is similar to the more advanced Google Analytics service, which many Blogger bloggers have already been using. The difference here is that Blogger Stats is integrated into the Blogger service, is easy to use, and keeps things simple.
To access Stats, navigate to draft.blogger.com and hit the Stats tab. You will immediately get an overview of your blog’s stats based on a specific time frame. This includes your hottest blog posts, audience region, and top traffic sources. The beauty of this stats feature on Blogger lies in the Now tab. This shows you what is happening on your blog in near real-time. Regardless of your blog’s topic or even it’s purpose, this gives you the ability to react quickly to your audience.
Google has said in the past that most users are not interested in real-time statistics, which is why no such feature exists in the popular Google Analytics package. You have to wait at least a few hours with Google Analytics to get an updated traffic report and this is sometimes a major annoyance. This makes it even more interesting that they’ve enabled such a feature on Blogger.
There are real-time analytics services like Woopra, Clicky, and Chartbeat, but most users are still going to use Google Analytics as well. It would be nice to have all this info in one place, robust analytics in real-time and also integrated with Google’s other services like Feedburner, Adsense, and Adwords. Does this feature being added to Blogger mean that Google is at least thinking about adding it to Analytics? Let’s hope so.
For you Blogger folks, the new feature keeps things simple and straight-forward. It has none of the bells and whistles of Google Analytics, like Campaigns and Adwords integration. You get basic statistics on your blog and you get them in near real-time. There are many users out there who would gladly trade most of the advanced features of Google Analytics for this one addition.
Will Google add real-time stats to Analytics? Are you interested in real-time stats on your blog?