Did anyone else take Shimelle's 2 classes on blogging? Well I did and in the second classes she went through the whole process of talking us through using our blog statistics using Google. It was fascinating to see where people were visiting from......................my visitors are primarily from America, Canada, UK and Australia, but there are the odd unusual countries like Russia and Asia too. Not that they are unusual countries per se but that I never thought I would have visitors from there. There are cool graphs of how many visitors you get each day, where from, and pretty piecharts.
So the changes to blogger have meant that you can now see all your statistics with your blog page and don't need to hop and skip across the blogosphere looking for another site. One place this has been really interesting is in the comments section. In the old days it just showed how many comments you had received, now there is also a lovely number showing you how many people have actually visited as well but not commented. Now I love a good comment and I do try to comment on each blog I visit cos I feel if you visit someone you should at least send a thank you card as it were. So it is lovely to see that a lot of people do come and visit even if they don't leave feedback.
Now this links very neatly into a little advert for the lovely Abi at ''Creating Paper Dreams''. She wrote last week on this subject specifically and about this Thursday having a bloghop of sorts where everyone makes a BIG commitment to commenting on the blogs they visit. She is calling it Operation Speak Out.......So here is a link to her post for you to read.
Er, what message? Seriously, this is all news to me! I haven't seen any message from blogger, though I use stat counter and I don't usually look at the blogger stats. Must check them out now. Interesting! Are you sure you don't have some special blogger hotline??
ReplyDeleteOh yes... I'm afraid I have had problems again, this time round. Couldn't load photos into any posts last week. A bit of a pain, considering all my posts have several photos! It seems to have been fixed now - let's hope that was the only issue.
ReplyDeleteI like that we can still keep the old format of Dashboard - I don't like the new layout, it's too confusing and untidy.
But, on a positive note, like you, I think it's nice to have extra stats and information available. Fun to see where our "views" come from - though I suspect the only ones from Russia are those whose "comments" are trapped by the Spam Filter!
And considering we can use Blogger without paying (well not in cash anyway), they do give a pretty good service!
I'll be trying to do as Abi suggests on Thursday - I will try to put aside a chunk of time to read, digest and Comment on as many blog posts as I can!
Hope you are feeling better now Jo and the lurgy has gone away.
I like checking my stats now and again and seeing which posts get most comments and visits. some of it has come in handy at work where we have online rooms and discussion forums for communities of practice.
ReplyDeleteAnd visitors who don't leave a comment? We call them lurkers. Our aim is to turn lurkers into contributers, so go Abi, catch those lurkers.
Thank you for that lovely plug Jo! what a superstar you are! I can't wait to have a real day of encouragment on the web! In terms of Blogger I do like the stats but always take them with a pinch of salt. I check my blog a lot through the day and I think that still adds up in page views. I haven't had any Blogger problems yet though. Touch wood. X
ReplyDeleteHopefully it will be troublefree - last time it caused problems for those of us leaving comments too! Yeay for commenting: I rarely visit without letting the person know I popped in - unless defeated by multiple attempts at the new word verification!
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