Analytics Log - Adil Khan

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2020: Year in Review For AnalyticsLog.com

Adil Khan

If you’re reading this, congrats! We almost made it to the end of 2020. I’m sure that this was a challenging year for all of us in professional and personal ways. I hope 2021 works out to be better for everyone. This blog post will just discuss a few thoughts on this blog rather than tackle something specific:

  1. Momentum is under-rated: In all of 2019, I had managed a measly 11 articles. In 2020, I did 36 articles [not including this one]. Getting into the habit of writing more often was challenging at first but once I pushed myself, I found it easier.

  2. Organic Search traffic feels rewarding: In May of 2020, a few of my posts started ranking in the top 3 results. [How to find outliers in boxplot for R, Adding UTM parameters in GTM, Placing HotJar script in Adobe Launch]. With these, the monthly traffic increased from about 200 sessions to around 2000. Once I noticed this uplift, I was more incentivized to write more often.

  3. It takes time for Organic Search to yield benefits: Between Jun - Aug, I managed to write 18 blog posts. The new posts I published took some time to get traction but the website went up from 2000 to a peak of 3,500 sessions a month. Not too bad huh! More importantly, it reduced the reliance on fewer posts to get the traffic that I was hoping for.

  4. Having some sort of target helped: Once the site got traction, I created monthly targets for the website and built a Data Studio report template for blogs to track the change. I wasn’t sure if the site would reach the target but aiming towards something helped motivate me.

  5. Starting a mailing list made me more thoughtful about content that deserves to be in inboxes: As marketers, we often take users for granted. But starting a Mailchimp opt-in list from scratch made me think about the quality as well.

  6. Most of the top performing articles for 2020 were related to R: I’m immensely grateful to the StackOverflow community for helping everyone. I do include links to SO threads and I’ve learned so much from there. Hopefully, I’ll improve in R.

Have a great year ahead.