2019 Blog Stats

You know what I haven't done in a while? Taken a look through my Google Analytics and extracted useful information from all my blog visitors, for a whole year.

There's actually a wealth of information to be found from Google's visitor tracking service, so I thought I'd pull a report from 24 December 2019 to date, to see what we could see. Hope you find it as interesting as I did!

So let's begin: during the period, 1077 unique users visited my page, viewing 3327 pages across 1377 sessions. That means that each unique user visited my blog approximately 1.28 separate times. The average session duration was just 42 seconds, though, so people didn't spend a lot of time actually reading my content.

Top Countries

The top five countries where traffic originated this year were:

1. United States
2. South Africa
3. United Kingdom
4. India
5. Canada

No surprise that the United States comes out tops, since they're by far the biggest Internet using country in the English speaking world. But it's nice to see that South Africa comes in at a really close second (35.34% of traffic came from the US, with 32.00% coming from South Africa).

Operating Systems

Now this is really surprising, because we're constantly being told that most users surf the web exclusively (or almost exclusively) from their mobile devices these days.

In my case, although the top spot here goes to Android, it's clear that the vast majority of visitors actually come from PCs:

1. Android [Mobile]
2. Windows
3. iOS [Mobile]
4. Macintosh
5. Linux

This pleases me greatly, because the vast majority of my own web surfing happens from my desktop PC (I don't even visit Facebook from my phone if I can help it), so that naturally tends to be the platform I keep in mind the most when creating content.

Where Do They Come From?

Social is king, as they've been saying for years, and the bulk of my social referrals come from Twitter and Facebook. But I get a decent amount of traffic from search—which is heartening, because it means people are searching for and finding my evergreen content:

1. Social
2. Organic Search
3. Direct
4. Referral
5. Email

The volume of traffic I get from Email is also good news, because it means that people are opening and reading my email newsletters, and clicking through to my blog from those.

Top Posts

Finally, my five most visited posts of the year. I love how three of those five are for posts that talk about places to get ebooks other than Amazon. As you know, a massive part of my outreach is getting people to understand that Amazon is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to ebooks, and that many of their business practices are actually damaging our beloved industry by stifling competing outlets.

1. Why I Will No Longer Buy Books From Amazon, If They're in KDP Select / Kindle Unlimited (May 2019)
2. Overdrive Libraries in South Africa (August 2018)
3. What's your favourite book of all time? (December 2018)
4. Writing for an American Audience: Why do Authors Compromise? (July 2019)
5. Alternatives to Kindle Unlimited (February 2019)

Also nice to see those two articles from 2018 still getting love... although I hope more of you visit the 2019 edition of your favourite book of all time, and vote on that!

Well, that's it, dear readers. I don't have any words of wisdom, or deep philosophical questions to ask at the end of this post. This has been purely an exercise in mental masturbation. I enjoyed and found it interesting, and I hope you did too. If not.... ;-)