I’ve got Google Analytics running on my site, because I’m curious about the traffic I get. 2017 has been the first full year I’ve had GA running, so I figured I’d take some time to look back at how the last year has been from the perspective of my website.
Views
First thing: pageviews. My site isn’t exactly popular, which is fine by me—I mostly maintain it just because I like doing it. Still, in 2017 GA recorded a grand total of 13.178 pageviews.
About 75% of visitors are “new sessions”, with the remaining 25% being returning visitors. The average session views 1,4 pages and lasts 49 seconds. I’m not sure how GA measures any of this, but there you go.
Demographics
I have a fairly international audience: 115 different countries are represented, from all over the world.
The overwhelming majority of visitors are from the US: roughly 1/3rd. The other 9 countries from the top 10 make up another 3rd of the total. Which means the remaining 33% of visitors are spread over the remaining 105 countries.
Pages
The most popular page, by a huge margin, has been the article I’ve written about NuGet package creation. This single page has accounted for 46% of all pageviews in 2017. I hope at least some of those people found it useful. Other popular pages include the homepage (surprise surprise!), my article about the SkyTracker, and my series of adventures with SHENZHEN I/O.
Referrals
One of the more interesting aspects of the GA reports is the referral information. Pretty much everyone finds my site either through search (84%) or through direct links (12%), the latter meaning that no referral information is available. However, there have also been a (very) small number of referrals through Facebook (odd, since I don’t use it), reddit, and GitHub. The Facebook referrals don’t contain any information other than that they came from Facebook, but the other referrals do. For instance, I learned that my popular NuGet article was submitted to reddit and linked in a couple of random GitHub issues.
2018
My goal with the site for 2018 is basically just to keep on truckin’. Like I said, I just do this for fun. My aim is to write roughly one blog article per month, but I really only write stuff when I feel like it so I don’t know if that is going to happen. But hey: it’s January 2nd right now, so the first one is in the bag! 11 more to go…