A few days ago I noticed that Google have so helpfully included a basic stats package as standard with every Blogger blog. This is part of an package of measures at making the creaky old blogspot interface more user friendly. As any convert to Wordpress will tell you, theirs is the bees knees and much more intuitive than the clunky thing suffered by the likes of me, Jim, Lenny, etc.
The stats package is basic. And I mean, really basic. You can browse top referrers, country of origin, audience figures over variable time frames, top searches, most popular posts and so on. However, and somewhat strangely, it only records visits. Not uniques. Not returning visitors. Just page views.
Back when a supple-faced youth founded this blog in December 2006 I took out a free (i.e. basic) account with Statcounter, and I've been using it ever since. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the Statcounter figures with the sorts of numbers being yielded by Google's package.
This is where things get a bit confusing. According to the built-in statometer this blog was visited 1,053 times yesterday. But Statcounter has a different story. It says I had 745 page views. The day before Google has me on 1,051 visits, and Statcounter 774.
Why the discrepancy? Just what is going on? Does Statcounter run a particularly stingy and stringent counting operation? Are Google inflating visits SWP-stylee so bloggers feel less bad about their lack of reach?
Any explanations none-too-heavy on techie talk are welcome.
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