The Top 10 Best Blogs About Analytics - Issue 83
A roundup of my favorite and popular blogs and newsletters to read about data and product analysis, data science, and data engineering.
Hello analysts and welcome to a monthly free edition of the Data Analysis Journal, a weekly advice column about data and product analytics. If you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:
Engagement and Retention. The Sticky Situation - an introduction into user activity analytics: the difference between retention and engagement, how to define engagement, how to measure its impact, which input and output metrics to use for A/B tests or KPIs reporting.
An Introduction To Data Architecture - data architecture 101, how it enables reporting and analytics, and common data stack across big and small companies, how to understand and use it for analytics.
Q&Analytics - a roundup of common questions along with my answers about SQL, Python, data analysis, and standard challenges analysts deal with: what skills are needed to become an analyst, do Product Managers need to learn SQL, can analysts survive without Python, SQL variations and which one to learn, how to increase trust in analytics and data given the broken or limited data stack.
Is it just me or is February a very stressful month?
Stocks plunge, political tensions arise, Olympic games somehow happen. And of course, Tableau, as expected, couldn’t resist not taking credit for team USA Olympic medals. Right.
Today I wanted to refresh my top 10 favorite blogs that I continually read on data analysis, product, marketing, technology, coding, and such. I keep my eye open for data content and usually start my morning by catching up on new articles and newsletters and wondering why the world became obsessed with Wordle and if Elon Musk will ever get some sleep.
Here’s the thing about analytical blogs - there aren’t many of them.
There are quite a few analysts who write, but not too many write often and commit to weekly/monthly publishings. Unlike data science: there are A LOT of resources about ML and AI, but when it comes to product analytics, there’s surprisingly not many - which was another reason why I started writing this journal. There are not many blogs out there dedicated to learning about product and BI analytics, metrics, analytical case studies, A/B tests, KPIs, reporting, visualizations, data architecture, critical thinking, and analytical frameworks.
Here is a list of my top 10 picks across multiple data categories:
Data and Product Analysis:
Avinash Kaushik's Blog still remains one of the best resources on digital marketing and analytics. I have been reading Avinash’s blog for too many years now and have adopted many analytical concepts from him. I borrowed his values for my own team, his concepts, and his thinking. Also, I highly recommend his book Web Analytics 2.0 on how to develop a strategy and apply techniques to measure marketing campaigns and experimentation.
Reforge Blog - is not an analytical blog, but their publications are an intersection between product and data. I specifically like Brian Balfour's Newsletter on growth, strategy, and user acquisition. I also enjoy his writing style - clear and concise. Easy to understand and without extra fuss. Too bad he doesn’t write often.
Product-Led Growth - read articles about product development and product growth with a heavy focus on SaaS: freemium, metrics and KPIs, onboarding funnels, scaling growth and monetizing.
Sisense Blog - I liked working with Sisense tools (and would switch from Tableau to Sisense in a second). Independent of their product, I also like their blog. As a popular dashboarding tool, they have many good articles on visualizations, best ad hoc reporting practices, embedded analytics, and more.
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter with a list of datasets across different topics, industries, and volumes. It’s priceless for analysts and researchers who are looking to develop their portfolios. All datasets are free and open. Go wild.
Chartr - you probably have noticed that I love Chartr a lot. An ocean of data in one slide. They use best practices of data storytelling very effectively.
Data Science, Statistics, and Data Engineering:
Haki Benita Blog about databases, SQL, performance tuning, query optimization practices, and more. My favorite blog to read about data engineering. I love every one of his SQL articles. Very nicely written.
DB Weekly - a weekly round-up of database technology news and articles covering new developments, SQL, NoSQL, document databases, graph databases, and more.
Postgres Weekly - a weekly email round-up of Postgres news and articles.
Analytics Vidhya is a good resource for ML and statistics. Make sure to check out their Glossary of common statistics terms. Very helpful.
Other interesting links and resources:
Analytics Dispatch is a weekly roundup of the latest data-related articles, podcasts, and stories selected by the team at Mode. Of course, it’s heavily associated with Mode (so expect to see publications about why Mode is the best tool ever), but their round-ups are good and often cover real-life analytics and metrics, reporting challenges, and proposed solutions.
Department of Product a weekly newsletter about product and analysis. More about a product, less about analysis, but some articles are good. Expect topics around product strategy, discovery, design, tools, launches, and some sparks of analytics in between.
Lenny's Newsletter on product, growth, and people management.
Meandering the Modern Data Landscape - can’t miss such a title. A new blog from Arpit (I shared his article last year about data democratization) with a mission to demystify the data space in general, and the Modern Data Stack (MDS) in particular.
GrowthMarketer - an all-in-one place to learn the best growth marketing tools, tactics, and strategies. Subscribe to read about conversion optimization practices, digital marketing strategies, must-know tools, and concepts.
Real Python is a weekly newsletter about… well, Python. New tutorials, guides, tricky cases breakdowns. This is about all Python though, not always related to data analysis.
Pylenin.com is another good Python newsletter but more focused on beginners. You will find a good description of data types, simple data transformations with many examples.
R Bloggers - Everything you could want to know about R, written by R users.
The Ravit Show Newsletter is a weekly newsletter with insights about the latest news on data, AI, events, books, and free resources.
KDnuggets is another well-known blog about ML, DS, Big Data, Analytics, and AI.
🪴Some housekeeping
Over the next few months, I’ll start introducing other analyst writers in my journal and sharing their publications about interesting analyses, case studies, and best practices. I’m learning a lot from them myself and am excited to get the word out to advance the current state of analytics.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next Wednesday!