Blog statistics: what do they really mean?

Looking at my list of all blog posts in the controlpanel I can see 2 columns with statistics. The first one 'Views' I presume shows how many hits that article got when someone viewed that post explicitly in the browser, and not watching in from the blog home page, or on the aggregated view of all blogs. The second 'AggViews' does that in that case show all views that the post has been in when watching the Blog home page and the Global Aggregated page?

Generally speaking, "Views" is the number of times somone viewed a post on the web via a browser, and "AggViews" is the number of times someone viewed the post via the RSS and Atom feeds.

More specifically, the web view count is only updated in the EntryView control.  This is displayed when you are viewing a single post.  If you are viewing a list of posts, such as on the blog home page, the view counts of the posts are not updated.

The AggViews works by embedding an "AggBug" invisible image into each post in the RSS/Atom feeds.  When someone views the posts in a feed reader that allows images, the image pionts back to a handler on your CS site that updates the AggView count for that post.

HTH

Great info again Kevin! Thanks!

This is really useful information for me.

So how can I tell how many people have viewed the main page of my blog?  I might be seeing only half the actual traffic in Views and Aggviews.

You can do it in two ways-

1. add code of google analytics or any web analytics provider & check out views & traffic details

2. add a counter which will tell how many people visited your blog page... but it may have returing visitors also..

 

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