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.

I'd Rather Be Writing received 1,552,615 page views during 2018, or 4,253 page views a day.
I'd Rather Be Writing gets about 1,552,615 page views per year, or 4,253 page views a day.

Here’s another slice of analytics focusing more on audience:

Breakdown of analytics
Here you can see a breakdown of sessions. During 2018, there were about 942,000 sessions, with users viewing 1.65 pages per session.

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:

API documentation traffic
About 59% of traffic to my site goes to my API documentation site. The rest pretty much does to my blog.

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.

Traffic comparison by year
Traffic comparison by year

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.)

  1. Swagger UI tutorial (12%)
  2. Documenting APIs: A guide for technical writers (5%)
  3. Step 3: Parameters (API reference tutorial) (4%)
  4. I’d Rather Be Writing: Latest posts (4%)
  5. Submit requests through Postman (3%)
  6. Quick Reference Guide Templates (2%)
  7. 10 realizations as I was creating my Swagger spec and Swagger UI (1%)
  8. OpenAPI 3.0 tutorial overview (1%)
  9. JavaScript: Events and Listeners (1%)
  10. 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:

Age and gender breakdown
There are twice as many males as females reading my site. This demographic reflects the more male-centric programmer culture.

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.

Most influential of 400+ tech comm bloggers
Influence among tech comm bloggers

Posts analyzing site analytics

For more details about analytics, see the following posts. These posts expand on audience interests and demographics.