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Bing Analytics and Stats for Blogger

Bing, Microsoft's search engine, comes with a few tools for webmasters to track their websites' stats. These tools are in no way as advanced as Google Analytics, but do let you see how a site is being crawled and indexed by Bing, and also allows for better control of submitting sitemaps to Bing.

Setting up Bing tracking and statistics for Blogger, Google's blog publishing service, is pretty straightforward, assuming you have a blog already set up on Blogger!!

All that's needed is:
  1. Sign in to Bing's webmaster toolbox (you'll need a Windows Live ID).
  2. Enter URL and get verification code for your blog.
  3. Add the verification code to the blogger template and save.
  4. Return to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox and finally verify the blog.

Sign in to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox

  • Once signed in, click "Add site".
  • In the dialog window that pops up, enter the url of your blog e.g. ThisIsMyBlogThereAreManyLikeItButThisOneIsMine.blogspot.com, then click Submit.


Get Verification Code
Once you have submitted the URL of your blog, you'll have to wait a few seconds whilst Bing checks that the site exists. Once Bing is happy it does it will open up a new "Verify Ownership" dialog window.

This window contains two options:

  1. Option 1: Place and XML file on your web server.
  2. Option 2: Copy and paste a <meta> tag in your default webpage.

Option 1 is not valid for Blogger blogs as we don't all work for Google and have direct access to their web servers  so we have to go with Option 2. Select option 2 and it will expand to reveal a meta tag. This meta tag is what will be put into the Blogger template.

If you click "Verify" now, Ownership Verification will fail as nothing had been added to the blog yet.

This browser window can either be left open or closed and come back to it later. There's no need to worry as the blog that is being verified will remain under the Sites list.

Add Verification Code to Blogger Blog
  • Sign in to blogger.

  • Select the blog you want to add the Bing verification code to and then go in to the design section.

  • Once in the design section, select "Edit HTML".

  • You should now be able to edit the template. Scroll down to the Edit Template section.
  • Find the "<head>" HTML tag in the template.
  • Just after the "<head>" HTML tag, paste the Bing verification code.
  • Save the template.


Verify the Blogger Blog
All that is left to do now is return to Bing's Webmaster Tools and verify the site.
If the previous window was left open from setting up the site in Bing, just click verify. If the window was closed or something else happened, just sign back in to Bing webmaster toolbox, find the blogger blog under the Sites list, and there will probably be a notice saying "Site ownership has not been verified. Verify Now".

Click verify now, to verify the site.

The End
That should be it. It will probably take a few days before any stats or analysis is recorded in Bing's tools, but results should be appearing soon enough.

The principles outlined above can be followed for adding any website to Bing for statistics, crawling and tracking purposes through Bing's webmaster tools.
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