If you’re thinking of advertising on idratherbewriting.com, it’s important to get a sense of the traffic and analytics of the audience so that your ad not only has visibility, but visibility with the right audience.
In 2018, idratherbewriting.com had an average of 1,552,615 page views, or about 4,250 page views a day. More specifically, users created 942,306 sessions, with 1.65 pages per session and an average of 1:44 minutes per session. I update the information here each after diving deep into the information from Google Analytics.
Analytics
Here’s a breakdown of site traffic analytics on idratherbewriting.com from Jan 1, 2018 through Dec 31, 2018, according to Google Analytics.
Here’s another slice of analytics focusing more on audience:
The following table includes more details from other Google Analytics reports (the date range is Jan 1, 2018, to Dec 31, 2018):
| Jan 1, 2018 — Dec 31, 2018 | Number |
|---|---|
| Page views | 1,552,615 |
| Average page views per day | 4,253 |
| Average page views per hour | 177 |
| Unique page views | 1,331,869 |
| Average time on page | 2:40 |
| Users | 687,818 |
| Sessions | 942,306 |
| Sessions per user | 1.37 |
| Average session duration | 1:44 |
| Pages per session | 1.65 |
| Bounce rate | 78% |
| Organic search traffic | 495,033 |
| Traffic from social | 5,596 |
| Social site breakdown | Linkedin 49%, Facebook 20%, Twitter 17% |
| Geographical region | US 35%, India 16%, UK 5% |
| Browser | Chrome 73%, Firefox 9% |
| Operating System | Windows 60%, Mac 20%, Android/iOS 13% |
| Device type | Desktop 86%, mobile 12%, tablet 2% |
API doc traffic percentage
In 2018, the majority of traffic came to my API documentation site:
The traffic from the API documentation visitors is outperforming other traffic sources. This represents a potentially new audience to which you can market tech comm solutions.
Growth from the previous year
I’d Rather Be Writing received significantly more traffic in 2018 (nearly double the page views) than the previous year. The blue line represents 2018, while the brown line represents 2017.
The increased traffic from the API documentation site probably accounts for the massive growth.
Top 10 pages overall (across all sites)
Here are the top 10 overall pages that received the most traffic last year. (The pages weren’t necessarily written during 2018.)
- Swagger UI tutorial (12%)
- Documenting APIs: A guide for technical writers (5%)
- Step 3: Parameters (API reference tutorial) (4%)
- I’d Rather Be Writing: Latest posts (4%)
- Submit requests through Postman (3%)
- Quick Reference Guide Templates (2%)
- 10 realizations as I was creating my Swagger spec and Swagger UI (1%)
- OpenAPI 3.0 tutorial overview (1%)
- JavaScript: Events and Listeners (1%)
- Inspect the JSON from the response payload (1%)
Again, these top pages show that most of the traffic is coming through my API documentation site, with Swagger UI tutorial leading the way.
Age and gender
The breakdown of audience age and gender is as follows:
For more details about site analytics, see Site analytics from Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2018 – 59% of overall traffic going to API doc site.
Quality of impressions
The quality of impressions depends on the influence of the site. Impressions from a highly influential site carry more weight than impressions from a less influential site.
- Top 25 Content Experience Influencer 2017
- Top 25 Content Strategist Influencer 2016
- Most Valuable Professional #2014, Indigo Byte Systems.
- #3 Influencer in #techcomm in 2014
- #1 Influencer in #techcomm 2013
- #1 Influencer in #techcomm 2012
- Most innovative tech comm blogger of 2011
- #2 Influencer in #techcomm 2010
Posts analyzing site analytics
For more details about analytics, see the following posts. These posts expand on audience interests and demographics.
- 2018 — Site analytics from Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2018 – are more engineers writing docs now?
- 2017 — Unexpected realizations after a comprehensive review of my 2017 site metrics
- 2016 — Analyzing top posts on my blog during 2015 — Deciding between brand versus readership
- 2015 — Top 10 posts, podcasts, tweets of 2014 – and what it all means
