Blogger, the popular free blogging platform, just launched a new feature called Blogger Stats, according to TechCrunch. It gives a pseudo-real time overview of page visits, article popularity, and traffic source statistics, and it's available on any non-private blog hosted by Blogger. By itself, the news isn't exactly noteworthy; there are many free and user-friendly traffic tracking tools external to the Blogger platform that feature the same functionality. What's interesting is that one of the most popular statistics tools in the non-Blogger world is Google Analytics, and Blogger is owned by Google.
What this news means for Google Analytics is as of yet unclear. TechCruch speculates that since Analytics does not yet have the "real time" feature that Blogger Stats does, Google will possibly roll up Stats into Analytics. On the other hand, information they gleaned from various Analytics support forums show that Google is convinced users don't want real time stats, and would rather focus on more robust and complete time lagged analysis.
This emphasizes how different the two products really are, and could be the key to explaining the purpose of owning two separate traffic tracking and analysis products. Blogger Stats, while offering more than sufficient data for everyday use, doesn't come close to offering the same amount of flexibility and analysis that Analytics provides. While everyday users have much to benefit from Analytics, its target audience are people who live and breathe traffic stats, whose cash flow might depend on it. Those people would sacrifice real time data for deep analysis of pageview trends and traffic content. Blogger Stats, on the other hand, is looking to woo in the casual blogger who doesn't necessarily want to be bothered with copying and pasting Analytics javascript into their HTML layout source code, and just wants an easy way to see how many people are reading their blog, what they're reading, and where they're coming from. Google has yet to comment on the development.
For now, the service is only available if you login to Blogger using the draft.Blogger.com portal, the site where Blogger tests various new blogging tools not yet ready for production.
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