As we end the year, we thought it was only appropriate to look back and hit some of the highlights for 2012. Here are some statistics about our website for 2012 (gathered primarily from Google Analytics and a few other sources):
- We posted 366 daily blog posts (good old leap year gave us a record) to a total of 1,571 posts since we started this particular blog.
- We received 3,869 comments on our blog for a total of 25,077 total comments since its inception. (Ok, with a day to go, but we had to count at some time).
- We received 11,497 spam comments this year that were blocked (we have no idea how many total spam comments over the years as we have reset the counter)
- You have viewed over 205 GB of data just this year from the blog.
- We received nearly 4 million hits on the website during the calendar year.
- Internet Explorer was 31% of our traffic, Firefox 20%, Safari 18%, Chrome 16%, and mobile and other browsers made up the rest.
- Mobile (phones and pads) were 21% of our visitors, compared to only 7.5% of our visitors last calendar year.
- 13% of our visitors’ primary language was not English. This is twice as many of our visitors in 2011 whose primary language was not English.
- Excluding “The Thundering Herd” or some variant, the most common Google search phrase before landing on our page was “1000″ . . . Huh???? Believe it or not, that comes from our 1000th post – which was not even in this year.
- Most popular weird search phrase (like “1000″ was not weird enough) was squirrels. We remain utterly amazed that people who google squirrels end up on our website, even though we do not have ground squirrels at Chez Herd (we only have those totally weird and really evil flying squirrels). And our Squirrels for Peace blog post was done way back in 2009. So stop the searches, ok?
- Most of our visitors who did not land directly on our page came from Google, but the second most common source was Facebook.
- Our most popular video for the year in terms of number of views was Eight is Enough.
- The most popular video in terms of minutes watched was Walking Rusty the Rooster, a video we made back in 2010.
- The most visited post of the year was Rusty’s passing.
Rusty’s High Step
- The most popular individual dog’s page visited was – Queen Natasha the Evil.
- The most popular story (that is the old post from our previous blog that are now shared as stories) of the year (as it has been for several years in a row) was Frankencouch, followed closely by Escape Artist. The most amazing part is that the Frankencouch story was visited twice as often as last year. Yes, it is growing in popularity despite having been written in 2006.
Thank you, dear readers, for continuing to visit and share in our fun. We look forward to a wonderful and adventurous 2013 – and wish you all the best health and happiness.
