2016 for Developers

Here we go, yet another year under our belts. Time flies when you’re having fun.

In 2016, this blog had more than 30000 visitors, and it is close to cracking 100000 views. That is so incredible, I can barely believe it! Thank you all so much for reading what I write! This really makes me happy!

Most views are on the home page, more so relative to the articles than in 2015. That must mean one of three things:

1. you all like to read this like a blog, as opposed to looking for specific information, or
2. I suck at SEO, or
3. my (convoluted and really quite hack-y) tracking is broken

I’m not sure which one it is, although 3 seems likely. Must fix that, if possible.

The most popular articles are the same as last year!

Firmly at the top, the s_code.js File – Overview with twice the views of the next, Reference – DTM Load Order. DTM Custom Event Rules is popular, too, and so are Finding a Report Suite ID and Migrating from H-code to AppMeasurment.

Guys, the latter shouldn’t even be relevant by now!

If you ask me what my top 5 posts where this year, I’d list the following:

1. Setting up for using the Reporting API – with R must be the top article, simply because it is time for us in the Analytics trade to up our game
2. Everything but the TMS was fun to write, and I learned things about how the tools of the Marketing Cloud are interlinked
3. SPAs, DTM, and clearVars was born out of necessity. You might have gathered that I don’t like SPAs (purely from an Analytics techie perspective), but this article made me realise they’re not that evil
4. Dynamic Report Suite ID with DTM was important. A lot of setups we do are somewhat custom. It is time we thought about how to handle those, set our own standards
5. And last but not least, Testing is like an Onion is about my pet interest, testing, and can therefore not be omitted. If all goes well, I’ll run a lab at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas in March about this

So the question I need to answer myself is: did I write less relevant stuff in 2016? Relevant to you, I mean? How can I do better in 2017?

I’m obviously hoping for Adobe product management and engineering to come out with new functionality, stuff that will lead to articles here on the blog.

Is there anything else you want me to do?

Or: who are you? Is the scope of this blog (Analytics for Developers) still good?

Other Stuff

About a third of traffic is from the US of A. India is strong at 12%, the UK comes in at 10% and Germany at 5%.

People seem to find stuff almost exclusively via search engines. Twitter is the only relevant social channel, or do we count LinkedIn? But even twitter only comes in at below 1%, or so WordPress claims. It doesn’t account for a good chunk of referrers, mind you, so who knows?

(My convoluted and really quite hack-y tracking with Analytics is unable to grab any referrers, so it doesn’t help here.)

From an internal point of view, 2016 has been busy.

I used to be proud of having a very healthy queue of postings. I used to feel good if I had postings scheduled for the next 2 months. 2016 has been a humbling experience on this front, I have to say. There has been one time when I wrote a posting on the day before go-live, and my queue has rarely been longer than 1 posting.

I’m mainly busy at home, 4 kids are really quite a lot of work. Big shout-out to my wife, here, who bears the brunt of that most of the time while I’m at work! But my travel habits have changed, too. I spend less nights in hotels (which is great!). Those used to be my most productive nights, though.

I will start 2017 with a good queue of 3 articles, and my goal is to keep it that way. Cadence, cadenca, cadence, as some people might say.

So, with that, I wish you a good time off, a brilliant year 2017, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Thank you again for your continued interest!