Didn't I just write the 2016 statistics post like... last week? Another year has flown by and with it another year of attempting to prioritize my writing. I'll be honest, I'm not optimistic about what I'm going to find when I compare 2017 to 2016. It was a year filled with a lot of change and opportunity so I'll use that as my excuse as to why I didn't write as much or as often as I had planned.

I was thinking though: every year I set a goal of writing more posts than the previous year, but that's only 1 metric to go by. Most of my posts are very detailed and fleshed out. It's nothing to write a post that's 1000 words. I regularly eclipse 2000 words and have even hit 3000 words. Perhaps I should be thinking more about word count and not post count? Certainly a 2000 word post takes more effort than a 1000 word post. On the other hand, word count says nothing about quality and could easily lead to excessive wordiness and run-on posts just to tilt the metrics.

Enough musing. Let's review the data!

2017 Year over Year Session Count

Ack. Yep, down a good deal compared to 2016. Disappointing but not surprising.

Like last year (and the year before), new vs returning users was unchanged. I'm starting to distrust that metric because I find it hard to believe it would hover within a few tenths of a percent multiple years in a row so I'm not even going to post the graph.

The 5 most popular posts this past year were:

Most Popular Posts in 2017

I like this. Unlike last year, a post that I actually wrote during the year has bubbled up to be one of the most popular posts on the whole blog. Looking at the most popular posts that I wrote in 2017, that same post was far and away the top post:

Most Popular Posts Written in 2017

Looking more closely at that post, it appears as though it's just an interesting topic based on the overwhelming referral source being organic search:

2017 Referral Sources

And speaking of sources, I had said last year that I wanted to increase the number of referrals from social media and it looks like I did just that with a 14% bump over last year:

2017 Incoming via Social Media

The two social platforms that I'm active on, Twitter and LinkedIn, were both up, with LinkedIn being waaaay up which I attribute to my actively starting to share all of my blog posts on LinkedIn during the year, rather than just specific posts as I was doing in 2016.

2017 Incoming Social Media Channels

As always, thank you to everyone who reads, comments and shares links to my blog. You'll notice there are no ads, popups or other BS on this site and there never will be. I write because I enjoy it and I believe strongly in sharing knowledge and experience. Thank you for participating in that.