Blogging Service Shootout: Blogger vs. WordPress

Traffic Management

If you're at all serious about your blog, you'll want to know what kinds of traffic it gets, how the traffic is getting there, and usage patterns. Traffic management tools can be as simple as showing daily page views, or as sophisticated as revealing the referring site URLs and keywords that led people to visit your blog.

Blogger

Given that Google owns Blogger, one would expect that it would do a good job providing traffic statistics. I found it met those expectations.

First off, it provides the basics: page views for today, yesterday, last month and during the entire site's history. You also get lists of the most popular blog posts and their page views.

In addition, you're provided with stats about referring URLs and referring sites, as well as keywords that were used to draw people to your site. There's also a list of page views by country, as well as a map showing the relative traffic from different countries using color-coding. You get a list of page views broken out by browser or operating system. And all this information can be sliced and diced so you can see it by the day, the past week, the past month, or all time. As with WordPress, I found nothing wanting in Blogger when it comes to traffic management.

WordPress

As it does with site management, WordPress shines when it comes to traffic management. And probably for the same reason: Because it is associated with a higher-end product and shares many of those features.

When I clicked Stats on the Dashboard's navigation menu, I found traffic-management heaven. Want to see page views by the day, the week or the month? You can do that, as well as seeing on what day you had the most traffic. Want to see what sites are referring traffic to you, and how much they refer? Yes, you can get that as well.

You'll be able to see the most popular posts and pages, pages that link to your blog, and more. You can block your site from being indexed by Google and other search engines if you want. You can create a site index. And you can even see how many spam comments have been removed automatically from your site using the Akismet tool.

All in all, I found WordPress had every tool I could want for traffic management, including many I never thought of. And they were all easily accessible, and simple to use and understand.

Bottom line

This one's a toss-up -- both offer excellent tools for tracking traffic, getting data on referring sites and more. You won't go wrong with either one.

Next Page: Extra features and power tools...