In my continuing effort to understand how many people I may be reaching with this blog, I've noticed a huge difference between the number of pageviews as reported by Blogger as opposed to the number reported by Google Analytics.
Looking at the Blogger stats, here's what I see:
October was our biggest month yet, with 9,456 pageviews. Since beginning BizMojo Idaho in September 2011, we've been seen by over 76,000 pairs of eyeballs.
Nice going, eh? Not so fast. Let's take a look at the Google Analytics chart now:
While impressive for a local blog (I wouldn't be sharing this otherwise), they present a more modest picture. In the case of October, pageviews were 4,803, slightly more than half the number reported by Blogger. Why is this? Apparently, Google can filter out bots that Blogger counts. These bots are crawling the Web looking for keywords, which is good for search engine optimization. I don't think there can be any argument that original content frequently posted is the key to a good profile with the search engines. This also probably explains the mystery of why our posts about Carl's Jr. and In-N-Out Burger get so many pageviews.
Here's a link where I learned picked up this information:
http://jensontaylor.blogspot.com/2012/03/blogger-stats-vs-google-analytics.html. I found the comments to be interesting, too.
