Barley Blog 2012 Year in Review
It’s that time of year again when I indulge my own narcissistic interests and review the past 12 months of site activity at The Barley Blog. So without further nonsense, let’s get into it.
At the time of this post, there were 298 total articles publish this year with an average of just over 24 per month. Looking at last year, that’s a solid jump of 20 additional articles with more to come in the remainder of December. Of those 298 posts, a whopping 214 were beer reviews (an increase of 31 over last year). Combined with last year’s increase, it appears as though I am most definitely focused on reviews on the site and not so much original content which is a predicament that has plagued me since starting this site back in 2006. Each year, I resolve to do better in this regard and each year I, well, don’t. Hopefully, I can do better in 2013.
In 2011, I had a slew of site updates including alternate domains and a version for mobile consumption. Well, we only had one major update to The Barley Blog this year and it was a pretty sizable one. In May I launched a version of this site that not only included a refined facelift, but also a backend codebase that allowed the content to be more easily digestible on a variety of screen sizes from tablet to smart phone.
And speaking of mobile devices, it appears as though traffic in that area is up, as well. Traditional Windows operating system accounted for 51.54% of the traffic (down a couple of percentage points from last year) and Apple/OSX brought in 19.92%, but the biggest increase by far was in iOS (iPad/iPhone) which brought 16.35% of traffic to the site. On a side note, Android devices accounted for 7.18% of traffic. So, it’s obvious that redesign/recoding of The Barley Blog was the smart thing to do.
Now let’s get into some traffic numbers. In 2012, The Barley Blog was visited 45,175 times by 38,135 unique visitors. Both of those are sizable increases over last year: a 69% increase in both areas — that’s just huge. Those visitors also accounted for 78,124 total pageviews. It looks like the work that I’ve done over the past two years is finally starting to pay-off as traffic trends are continuing upwards.
Much like last year, I’m still not entirely sure why, but the site continues popular in Malaysia, though it’s numbers have dropped off a touch this year while U.S. traffic and that in the UK have increased. Here’s how the site stands across the globe in terms of visits (only top five regions listed): United States (85.3%), Malaysia (2.3%), United Kingdom (1.5%), Canada (1.4%) and Sweden (0.08%).
As far as site content goes, the same two pages from last two years continue to garner the majority of traffic on the site:
- Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy (beer review)
- Blue Dog Wild Blue Lager (beer review)
- Spoetzl Brewery Introduces Shiner Wild Hare Pale Ale (press release that accounted for that massive spike in traffic above)
- Newcastle Founders Ale (beer review)
- Flying Dog Wildeman Farmhouse IPA (beer review)
As has been the case of the past couple of years, that stupid Blue Dog review just won’t go away. It still gets a ton of search engine traffic from Google. Apparently, folks really like alcoholic grape soda. At any rate, there you have it. 2012 was another solid year for The Barley Blog in all aspects. Traffic was up as were the number of posts. Here’s to a fruitful, beertastic 2013.