For some reason, I skipped Friday’s invitation to a late open party with the intention to catch some sleep and energy for my next day ride back to Munich. I was killing some time on Facebook and for me, that usually means running upon some interesting topics from the world of IT. One topic specifically caught my attention. A well known local website in Slovenia published a survey about the salaries of Slovenians working in an IT industry at home and around the world. Their initiative was publicly well accepted. In fact, in was on fire. By that, I mean a lot of participants contributed with their answers to a survey 🙂 Almost 900 people (so far) from Slovenia were involved and that is quite an impressive collection of data for Slovenian IT market. The owner of the survey publicly shared the data with the community. My scrolling finger started to hurt while checking the raw data, so I decided to make a bit more attractive and dynamic presentation of data using Power BI.
Plans to going to bed early were postponed. Eventually, I still had to go. In the morning, just before lunch, I wrapped up some final adjustments and published an embedded results of my work to my website. I made sure the owner of the data gets the memo as well as the community of Slovenian developers with a post in a closed group.
Then? .. The traffic went wild. Google analytics metrics jumped straight from 0 to above 50, reached even 70 active users on the site. For an hour the traffic didn’t fell below 50. I was mind-blown.
A day ended with 1,191 unique sessions and 1,435 page views in total. No marketing, no landing pages, no email marketing, no PPC, nothing. Just pure data in form of a beautiful, yet simple, Power BI visualization.
A week from then brought 2,755 unique page views and total of 3,240 views on my website. Apart from few shares on some other Facebook groups the site wasn’t additionally promoted. I’m trying to imagine how much damage such post could do if there would be a proper marketing campaign planned for it. There is still a chance though. The improvement of the survey (to get a bit more quality data) and a little help from IT communities could make a nice base ground for some enthusiastic students who would like to make a research paper or a project on this topic.
Still quite amazed, I started to think about some other public data sets I could visualize and deliver to interested communities. If there will be some extra time on my hand, I might bring some interesting data to life again.
Searching for an example I’m talking about? It’s here: https://martinknapic.com/place-slovencev-v-it-sektorju
