2020 Retrospective
20 Dec 2020 » Opinion
My colleague Jan Exner has the habit of writing a retrospective in his last post of the year. He is not the only one, Datanalyst.info has done it from time to time. I have never written any such post, but I think it is a good idea. This is my first attempt. Hope you like it!
I do not think I need to explain that the year 2020 has been a bad year in general terms for everybody. At Adobe, we have been working from home since March and will continue to do so for months to come. I have not seen my colleagues face to face since then, which is something I really miss. In the past 8 years at Adobe, I have enjoyed the company of great people from all over the world. There have been lots of funny memes and jokes, where the students of the future have to study the COVID-19 pandemic, to their dismay. Nobody will have fond memories of this year.
If that was not enough, being an expat, means that I have not had the opportunity to visit my family during this winter break.
This blog in 2020
That being said, let’s have a look at how has my blog behaved during the last 12 months. I posted 24 times during this period and the key metrics show the following trends:
Considering that December has not ended yet, I can proudly say that, consistently, 2,000 visitors come to my blog every month. Deduplicating these visitors, I get a total of 22,000 visitors during 2020. I know that for today’s influencers, this number would not be too much, but knowing that this is just a hobby, it is very niche and I only write every 2 weeks, I consider this a great success.
If I check the content, the top 15 posts have been:
| Pos | Page | Page Views | % Page Views | Time Spent Per Visitor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | How to debug an Adobe Analytics implementation | 2.969 | 6,7% | 293 |
| 2 | Server-side Adobe Analytics | 1.511 | 3,4% | 379 |
| 3 | Adobe Analytics Segment Containers | 1.011 | 2,3% | 487 |
| 4 | Adobe Analytics Data Warehouse | 992 | 2,2% | 325 |
| 5 | Multi-tenancy in Adobe Target | 960 | 2,2% | 412 |
| 6 | Adobe Target Segments | 938 | 2,1% | 274 |
| 7 | Adobe Analytics Segments - The Basics | 886 | 2,0% | 372 |
| 8 | Clickstream Data Feed | 870 | 2,0% | 311 |
| 9 | Server-side ECID | 784 | 1,8% | 459 |
| 10 | Declared IDs | 764 | 1,7% | 457 |
| 11 | ID sync | 764 | 1,7% | 446 |
| 12 | Data Sources in AAM | 712 | 1,6% | 425 |
| 13 | Server-side Adobe Target | 696 | 1,6% | 467 |
| 14 | DMPs: data in, data out | 602 | 1,4% | 338 |
| 15 | Cookie-based destinations | 586 | 1,2% | 370 |
Last time I checked, the post on debugging was also at the very top. I may need to write a more up-to-date version of that post, which is more than 4 years old. Other than this, posts on segmentation, server-side and AAM are also very popular.
Regarding the time spent per visitor, I would like to think of it as a clear signal of the interest in the posts. Remember that these are averages. I assume that people read the post, while going back and forth to another tab to apply what I explain. If you do not want to do any maths, 180s are 3 minutes, 300s are 5 minutes and 420s are 7 minutes.
Finally, I receive visits from all over the world, with the top 3 countries being USA (30%), India (20%) and UK (10%).
Evolution
Numbers on their own do not usually mean a lot. You need to compare them with a baseline to see how they are trending. In May 2018 I changed the report suite; let’s have a look at the evolution since then:
Last year was my best year, but the 2000 visitors/month mark has been a constant most of the time. I should review what happened last year, to understand these differences. In any case, I am happy with these results.
The future
I still have a long list of topics that I would like to cover. As I am working as an architect nowadays, there are many integrations I would like to cover. However, I also know that this type of posts take a very long time to write, time I do not always have. Other than that, there have been quite a few changes in the last few years, which I could explain, not to mention the last big release, the Adobe Experience Platform. I still need to learn more about it, but, as I understand it better, I will write more about it. In summary, I plan to continue writing in 2021. Are there any topics I have not covered that you would like me to write about?
Besides the content, I have started a personal project, where I am trying to migrate from WordPress to Jekyll. I like very much the idea of just writing in Markdown and use static files. In the end, this is not a newspaper or a professional blog, that is updated continuously. However, I have to admit that it is taking longer than expected.
Photo by Markus Winkler from Pexels