Google Launches Real-Time Blogger Stats, what does it mean for Google Analytics?

Google has introduced a full-featured stats dashboard for its free blogging service, Blogger.

Blogger Stats displays traffic and source info for individual posts, and it does it in near real time, keeping historical data as well. It also tracks popular search keywords that send visitors to your blog, and breaks down your traffic by country of origin, as well as web browser and the operating system your visitors are using.

Users who track their blogs’ performance via Google Analytics should be aware that the data Blogger Stats provides may be different as it uses a different data collection mechanism. Also, keep in mind that Google Analytics offers far more features, but is only updated every couple of hours, while Blogger Stats updates its data almost instantly.

What this news means for Google Analytics is as of yet unclear. TechCruch speculates that since Analytics does not yet have the "real time" feature that Blogger Stats does, Google will possibly roll up Stats into Analytics. On the other hand, information they gleaned from various Analytics support forums show that Google is convinced users don't want real time stats, and would rather focus on more robust and complete time lagged analysis.

This emphasizes how different the two products really are, and could be the key to explaining the purpose of owning two separate traffic tracking and analysis products. Blogger Stats, while offering more than sufficient data for everyday use, doesn't come close to offering the same amount of flexibility and analysis that Analytics provides. While everyday users have much to benefit from Analytics, its target audience are people who live and breathe traffic stats, whose cash flow might depend on it. Those people would sacrifice real time data for deep analysis of pageview trends and traffic content. Blogger Stats, on the other hand, is looking to woo in the casual blogger who doesn't necessarily want to be bothered with copying and pasting Analytics javascript into their HTML layout source code, and just wants an easy way to see how many people are reading their blog, what they're reading, and where they're coming from. Google has yet to comment on the development.

For now, the service is only available if you login to Blogger using the draft.Blogger.com portal, the site where Blogger tests various new blogging tools not yet ready for production.