Top 5 posts of April 2011

Do you read your analytics? Which do you use?

It's rather curious to see how each service reports differently. Lately, I've been looking at Blogger's, more for the convenience than anything else. In case you haven't noticed, on the posting page, there's a button, alongside the others such as settings, design, and monetise, which says STATS. Click on this and you'll see all kinds of statistics for your blog.

I made a quick comparison between Blogger and Google Analytics, and was rather surprised at the differences. Don't they belong to the same company? Here are my top 5 posts for the month of April.

BLOGGER

1. Help Japan if you can (250 page views) (published 15 March 2011)
2. Interview with Nicky Hockly Listening Activity (168 page views) (Published 21 April 2011)
3. Tweeting is for the birds - Debate Activities (167 page views) (Published 21 April 2011)
4. To be like a dogme with a bone (113 page views) (Published 27 April 2011)
5. Barcelona vs Real Madrid Cincomentarios (110 page views) (Published on 30 Nov 2010)

Total page views for April 2011: 8,481

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

1. Help Japan if you can (127 page views)
2. Prepositions of time and place: at, in, on (105 page views) (published 29 Mar 2011)
3. Tweeting is for the birds - Debate Activities (103 page views)
4. We are the champions: One song, countless activities (101 page views) (published 3 Apr 2011)
5. Transcribe text to phonetic symbols (94 page views) (published 25 Feb 2011)

Total page views for April 2011: 6,099

One thing worth noting is that if someone visits the home page (902 visits according to Google Analytics), the posts they read aren't recorded.

What they both agree on are the top 2 referring sites, which are Google (a long way in front) and Facebook. What they disagree on is the third spot. Analytics gave it to Oxford University Press, while, for Blogger, it's That's English. Direct visits coming from email (Feedburner) are excluded as Blogger doesn't seem to record these.

If I were to look at the figures controlled by other analysts I use such as Sitemeter, Blogpatrol, and StatCounter, they all give varying results. It doesn't really matter much to me, but I do wonder which of these potential advertisers look at.