Rachel E. Watson

Hello, readers. I know you're there.

This wonderful age of social media and internet analytics just offered up another cool twist recently. Google added a stats tracking tool to blogger.

Apparently it took effect in July, but I didn't find out about it until this week, when I was talking to a fellow blogging friend who pointed it out to me.

Here's how it works: When you log into your blog and land on your Dashboard (the administrator homepage), underneath "Manage Blogs" in the same toolbar where "Posting" appears, on the far right, there now is a tab called "Stats." Click through, and you'll find you can look at an overview or hone in more specifically on traffic sources and your audience demographics by country.

Screengrab of my stats page -- you're looking at the audience tracker tab.

So guess what that means? If you're reading this post right now from the U.S., Italy, Brazil, Belgium, Malaysia, Ukraine, Serbia or anywhere else in the world, I can look on my stats page and find a record of your visit and, in some cases, see what searches led you here. I don't know who you are or anything about you, but I know you're out there, and I hope you'll visit me again.

If you've landed on my page and you hail from somewhere outside the U.S., leave me a comment! I'd love to hear the story of how you landed here and what you're looking to find.

** Clarification: A reader brought up a valid privacy concern. Let me be clear that the only information Google Blogger Stats lets me see is the readers' country of residence and the search terms/search path they used to get to my page. It does not share individual IP addresses or personal information. **