The statistics packages offered by most popular blogging services are either limited or non-existent, leaving many bloggers struggling to get good information on traffic to their blog. Those of us who use FeedBurner have long had good feed-related statistics, but we've had to rely on other services to get information on blog traffic.
In my case, I've been using Google Analytics for blog stats, and while it's a good service I've found it awkward to have my feed stats and blog stats in different places. So when I was offered an early look at FeedBurner's site statistics service (announced earlier today), I jumped at the chance.
I've been using FeedBurner's site stats for several days now, and overall they've done a great job of providing a lot of information in a very friendly way. Now in addition to seeing information about my feed subscribers, I can also see things like:
- Which searches lead people to my blog
- Which external links are bringing visitors to my blog
- Which pages are being viewed the most
- What browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions my visitors are using
In other words, I can see the sort of information you'd expect from a site statistics service, except that it's integrated with my feed stats.
As with all new services, though, there are a few missing pieces, the most notable of which is that I didn't see a way to exclude my own traffic from the site stats. Update 16-Feb-2007: FeedBurner has added the ability to ignore yourself in your site stats. Nice!
Disclosure: NewsGator (the company I work for) shares an investor with FeedBurner.
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