Cave Bits: Uncovering Website Analytics

SaaStrophe Series: The Campaign That Never Was by Yulia Olennikova @ N.Rich

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🚀 Key Takeaways:

  • Why attribution windows can obscure long-term success
  • How SEO campaigns can take time to pay off
  • The value of documenting and celebrating wins, even if they come too late

Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at what happens when marketing success doesn’t fit neatly into reporting timelines—and why patience in campaigns sometimes delivers the biggest wins.

In this episode, I share the bittersweet story of a campaign that seemed destined for failure—until it wasn’t. We lined everything up: new landing pages, revamped content, and paid ads. At first, the data looked grim, and after 90 days, the campaign was declared a flop.

But then something surprising happened: a revamped blog post started ranking on Google, bringing in 20k+ clicks per month and hundreds of conversions—all organically. The only problem? By the time the results rolled in, management had already moved on.

The Campaign That Could Have Lived,  a story by Yulia Olennikova

​This could have been my best campaign. We came up with the theme, created a set of nice landing pages, ran paid ads, and even found an old article on the blog with decent traffic that we revamped according to the new messaging.

The results were mind-blowing: the revamped article started ranking on Google like crazy. At some point, it was generating over 20,000 clicks monthly. We had hundreds of conversions associated with this article and the campaign in general.

The thing was… it all happened outside the attribution window. Our practice was to look at the campaign data in 90 days after launch and then report on its success or failure.

Our data over the first 90 days had shown it was a failure.

Then, a month later, traffic started growing. In six months after the campaign launch, the campaign was steadily generating dozens of thousands of visits per month. All organic, no paid. I tried to bring it up, showing the spike in traffic and new users to the management and the analytics team—all I got was “Okay, curious, but the campaign is over already.“

There’s a silver lining to it though—I have some very good numbers to put up on my LinkedIn bio. Who cares if it happened 90 or 180 days after—it happened, and that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?