Blogger Stats

This post is not going to be about quilting or sewing or Grandma or the twins or a recipe or the Buckeyes. No, I have some questions about blogging that I'd like to have answered, so I am taking this post to do that. (Sorry, fellow quilters, but I just have to!)

I've been blogging for quite awhile now - since 2009 when I retired from full-time teaching. In the time that I've been doing this I have learned a lot of things about blogging and I continue to learn new things all the time. There's one area, though, that I am really NOT getting, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to ask some of you seasoned bloggers to explain it to me.

What better ways are out there for analyzing how viewers get to my blog? I use the stats information  provided on Blogger, but I think it's safe to say that more sophisticated tools are out there for the small-time blogger like me.

Here's what began my curiosity. I had a day about 2 weeks ago that my daily visitors skyrocketed. Here's the screenshot of the chart.

 If you look at the side, visits are being measured with increments of 100. Whoa! I never, never have that. You can see where my numbers normally are. So what spiked my viewership late on the 13th or on the 14th of this month???  I have looked at other data from this stats page, but nothing shows me any remarkable change that would cause this.

Here's what a normal chart looks like for me. It measures the visits in increments of 15. A whole lot less than the one above.

 So what can you tell me? I have looked into the tags I had on the posts for the 13th and 14th. It was at the time the Ohio State Buckeyes had won the National Championship. I think I tagged the Buckeyes and used the tag "National Championship." That might explain how people got here through a Google search. But over 130??? I  just don't see it happening.

I have heard of a thing called Google Analytics - is this something that I need to access and figure out?

Thanks in advance for whatever help and/or insight you bloggers can provide.

Happy Quilting,