So I’ve made a promise to myself to post monthly traffic reports.  It’s a way of holding myself accountable to my goals of providing more and more content to my beloved readers and it’s also a good excuse to break open Google Analytics every month.

December was, and there’s no other way to put it, a slow month for the blog.  A combo of some personal stuff I had to overcome combined with severe writer’s block meant that I only posted 17 times in December, well below my goal of 25 posts.  January is a new month, so it’s back to it!

Top Posts from December

a boat on the water

  1. 5 Favorite Pictures: Hallstatt, Austria
  2. The Dark Side of Miles and Points
  3. My 10 Favorite Pictures from 2016
  4. So you got a camera for Christmas, now what?
  5. Our Crazy 3-day Trip to Israel

Overall no big surprises here, the picture-heavy posts tend to do really well on Flipboard so those will get quite the spike in viewers.  The Dark Side article was intensely personal and meaningful to me and I’m glad it did so well (it was also picked up by a few other blogs), and I hope to publish some more articles about that topic soon.

I still struggle to find a good balance between travel articles and photography articles but the camera article did well on both fronts, as I know many people get cameras for Christmas or will buy them in preparation for a big trip.

Where my traffic came from in December

Like I implied earlier, sessions were waaay down from November, but that’s ok.

Traffic Sources

  • 35% from Flipboard, down from 55% in November
  • 26% from Google search results, up from 10% (we’ve recently made some SEO-related changes which might explain it)
  • 23% directly visiting my blog, relatively consistent with November
  • 5% from BoardingArea and Prior2Boarding networks
  • 3% from Facebook
  • 1% each from Mommy Points and Travel Blogger Buzz
  • 7% various other sources

It looks like the Google search updates we made helped, but there also wasn’t much content in the latter half of the month to generate referrals to the site, which I think explains the 26% Google number (my broscience thoughts being that more new content means a lower percentage of Google traffic).

Device Type

  • 61% mobile
  • 23% desktop
  • 15% tablet

Desktop views were up this month, I think that’s because Flipboard numbers were down.  Since Flipboard is primarily a mobile platform it makes sense that if those views are a higher percentage of my total that desktop percentage would be lower.  It’s still crazy to me to realize just how few people visited the blog from a desktop, it makes me very certain I can start posting lower-resolution images to increase my page loading time.

Location

  1. USA
  2. Canada
  3. United Kingdom
  4. Singapore
  5. Australia
  6. Hong Kong
  7. Malaysia
  8. Germany
  9. India
  10. Philippines

Well it looks like I’m consistent here, the 10 countries are the same, some moved up and some moved down.

 

Expectations for January

I have quite a few articles in the works for January, hoping to make my goal of 25 posts.  I’m also in the process of bringing on two additional writers who I think will provide unique perspectives, hopefully they’ll be up and running in the next month or two.

If I do things well I think my January numbers should easily outpace December but probably will not get back to the level of November 2016.  Either way, it’s going to be a great month so let’s all get to it!

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