I have been using Google Analytics on this site for over a year now to monitor all sorts of things like number of visitors, demographics, pages hit and even screen sizes being used. As 2017 drew to a close, I was curious about some of the numbers specific to the year.

Intelligence is a great feature of Google Analytics that allows you to search over data in plain English. For example, I can ask “Most popular months in 2017” which will return the top list of months per page view in 2017. You can also ask something as specific as “What is the slowest loading page” and it will return a list of pages which have the worst bounce rate.

Google are often accused of being creepy with data. If given permission, they can track your every move in Maps, track your interests using Search, and more - but that’s only if you give them permission. Services like analytics are so good, I am more than happy to allow them to track my site usage. It’s a small price to pay.