You have started a blog, you have started to get some readers…but how many?  Some people are interested in how many people are looking at their blog and how they are finding it, and if you want to attract PR companies in order to do reviews, then it is useful to find out what your ‘stats’ are.

Blogger has a free statistics tool that you can use if you have a blogger blog.  It is really useful in checking out the basic information you need to know- like the amount of visitors and the amount of page views.

Just go to your main blog dashboard and click stats…

The tool is really easy to use, and has more than enough information.  It is measured in real time, meaning you can see exactly what is sending you traffic and when.

The next tool worth mentioning is probably the most famous- Google Analytics.  Google Analytics is a powerful, free tool that helps you monitor a huge amount of information about you site and it can be used on any blog platform.

To sign up you will need a google account which is quick and easy to set up.  If you then go to www.google.com/analytics you will be able to sign up for a analytics account.  Once you have done this it will ask you for a little detail about the blog you want to track and then it will take you through to a page which looks something like this.

You will need to paste the above code into your website just above the  </head> tag.  If you get stuck then just ask us as it is really easy to do.

Once that is done you are ready to use Analytics!  You can track your visitors, traffic sources, keywords and it really gives an insight into who is visiting your site.

Another great free site is Stat Counter and that is the one I use for my personal blog.  It works very much in the same way as Google Analytics but I just find it a bit more visually easy to use.  It is free, straight forward to use and does the same things as Google’s Analytics tool.

You can see how people are finding you through search engines and break it down either by year, month, week or day…

Here is an example of how people have found my blog via search engines this morning.

You will see that they are really quite random!  But they can be a lot worse than that- I have had literally the most crazy keywords!  If you click on the magnifying glass it gives you some more details about the search, including how long they stayed on the site and what google ranking result you were.

You can also see links of where your traffic is coming from- this is the part I use the most as it shows you how people are finding you- it is always useful as sometimes you won’t even realise that someone has linked to you.

You can do so much but another thing I like is that you can see what each visitor is doing on your site and what links they are using to exit and what posts they are looking at.  For example this one….

You can see how often they have visited the site and what they did on their last visit.

It is certainly worth checking this tool out because you can do so much more than what I have mentioned, it is just to give you an idea.

Finally the last statistics tool which I think is worth a mention is Hit Sniffer.  This site is similar to the others, but it just again looks different.  It is another quite visual tool and uses a lot of graphs to show you where your traffic is coming from.  You do have to pay for it but depending on your traffic, it can work out as just a couple of pounds a month.  You can also have a 7 day trial to see whether you like it enough to pay the monthly fee.

It does all the same things that the other tools I have discussed but one thing that it does too which is totally crazy is that you can see how many people are visiting and actually live chat with the visitors that are on your site.  I would never ever do this because can you imagine how freaked out you would be if you were the visitor, but I still find it a really clever tool!

So there we have it- our top stat tools for your blog.  All the tools I have mentioned here I have tried at one point and I can recommend them all.  I nowadays just use Stat Counter as it does all that I want it too, but it is worth having a further look into them to see which one suits you best.  They all basically do the same thing, it just depends on the feel you get for them as to which one you prefer.  Some people may get on ok with just the basic Blogger stats but some people may want a little bit more information.

The main thing to remember is that whatever your stats are, unless you are blogging for business or to make an income, blogging is just a bit of fun and therefore you shouldn’t get too hung up on checking them too often.  However when you do want to check, these tools certainly are a great way of seeing who is looking at your site.