Time to crunch some numbers.
Data
One more day to go. I feel that this blog thing has gone pretty well so let’s look at some numbers.
I haven’t really looked at the Google Analytics much for this whole experiment. I checked a couple of times to see if numbers were coming in and that I had configured the logging correctly.
And as someone that loves to go through numbers, this is a treat for me.
Views
It seems that the views themselves have been pretty stable, which was a surprise to me, since I would expect more views at the start and then a slow decline.
It’s not big numbers but I’m happy with anyone interested in my ramblings.
We have around 200 views a day, spread around each blogpost, except for Blogvent 3 - std::string_view and std::map which was posted to Reddit by someone and got ~2000 views from that. The comments there were relatively nice, which is probably a first for /r/cpp, so congratulations to them.
Outside of this outlier, the most viewed post was the first one Blogvent 1 - Conference Talks, as expected. 2nd place was Blogvent 4 - Headless Doom and 3rd place was Blogvent 17 - What are monads?
The lowest viewed one was Blogvent 21 - What YouTube video has the most sponsored segments?, that one was kind of an outlier in views, which seems weird, because the other blog post related to this was not, Blogvent 20 - What is the longest YouTube sponsored segment?
What I am happy with is the average time spent on the page, because even if you have views, people might open the page, scroll for a few seconds and then leave, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
The average time spent seems to hover around 30 seconds to 1 minute, and for blog posts that take about a minute or two to read this is really nice to see.
The outliers here (average 1:30 or so) all have videos embedded on the page. So that’s a hint for the future.
Audience
I didn’t have the demographics information enabled, since I felt that was too weird to collect and it’s not like I can do anything actionable about knowing if Google tells me what it thinks your age or gender is.
What is interesting is knowing how many are new visitors vs how many are returning. 80% of each visit is a new visit, which was much higher than I expected, I imagined that I would keep a certain crew coming back for more but no, mostly new people.
5% of you visited 15 or more times. If that’s you, then thank you :)
Most of you were iOS, like by a lot (40%). I did not expect I had so many Apple fans. Next up was Android (25) and the other operating systems were 15% or less. 4% Linux and 1 visit from Firefox OS.
65% Mobile and 35% Desktop. 6 visits from a Tablet.
Most common language outside of English was German and 3rd place was Finnish. Danke and Kiitos.
I have something different planned for tomorrow. So until then…