Monday, May 28, 2012

Google stats on Blogger are essentially useless

The new Blogger UI presents basic stats integrated right into the blogging interface, so I see them.  And they are utterly useless.  Yesterday's post about shell command apps has garnered 48 hits.  From where?  Why?  No idea.  I do see 43 hits (to somewhere on the blog) from a porn site in Russia - which is, yes, a way of spamming my stats reports, thank you very much.

I can only see the top 10 search phrases that brought people here.  That's, yes, useless - on a blog with a topic as sprawling as the intersection between programming and semantics, of all things, the phrases indicating people's interests must number in the hundreds or thousands.  But I can't see them, so I don't actually know what people are interested in reading about.

It's enough to make me write my own analytics platform.  Just for Blogger, and just to track what I actually want to track.

Update 2012-12-12: and I'm not the only one - see my post today on Better analytics!  I need to set up a feed for search terms.

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