My best wishes for 2009!!!
Posted on | January 2, 2009 | No Comments
My best wishes for the 2009 to all off you!!! 
Note: Sorry for not writing for a while but my laptop was stolen from my home leaving me offline until I’ve got a new one. On the other hand the book I’m writing was just saved in the stolen computer so I have to write everything again which means that I wont be posting with the regular frequency during the following months. Thanks for your understanding!!!
How to improve your online businesses and not die trying
Posted on | December 19, 2008 | No Comments
The main goal in online projects, like in the rest of the industries, it is to maximize the benefits. If you want to do that the key is taking as much as you can from you current capacity (what you already have).
The best thing that could happen to us is that much of what we are looking for (our goal) crosses through our system (campaign, website, shopping cart, etc). The effective quantity of things that flows through your system is called throughtput.
In order to simplify the process lets say that our online project is based on three main activities.
1- SEM Campaign.
2- Product landing page.
3- Sales confirmation.
Now lets say that the SEM campaign drop 50 people to our product landing page, from which 30 of them select a product and just 10 of them finally buy a product. So what is your troughtput? Exactly, just 10!!! Which means that is doen’t matter how many people you’ve got in your campaign and in your product landing page. All that people is your non converted stock, or to make it simplier, “raw material” that cannot be converted into final product. I mean, your goal it is generating money through sales and not acumulating people in your home page, that will increase your operative cost and decrease your thoughput. All the people you driven to your site through any campaign represent a cost to you so if that people doesn’t represent a sale it is just dropped money.
Now, you have in your system (project) several bottle necks. We don’t get all the clicks from our impressions, nor do the total pageviews (in the product landing page) from the clicks and finally we don’t get a sale from each pageview in a landing page (we could add an extra step, a very important one. We don’t get a repreated sale from each sale).
Lets see an example of how people behave today. Lets suppose that we have an ecommerce site. The ecommerce site receive leads (or potencial clients) from a banner campaign. We have the following process:
1- clicks= 1.000.
2- product view= 200.
3- sales (conversions)= 50.
Can you calculate the throughput? Well it seems to be very simple….just 50!. The problem is how we understand our system and, then, make desicions. In order to increase sales most people increase the advertising budget. Increasing hte advertising budget doesn’t increase your bottle neck capacity. It just increase the quantity of people in your site (remember that in this case your goal is money and your earn money by product sales) which increase your cost but not your thoughtput generating a huge stock in people (in this case people = stock = cost= waste of money).
Now, why should we try to drive more people to your site when the restriction (bottle neck is not there). Even when it is true that we will increase our sales, we are just cheating ourselves because we are not solving our main bottle neck, the one that is restricting our sales.
If instead of understanding our project as lot of things we consider that they are one thing compossed by a group of things working together is gonna be easier to make the correct decision. Our bottle neck is sales, ok?. Right. What would be our first step in order to improve our sales? First of all we should try to understand what is preventing us of increasing sales from 50 to 200. Right now that is just our restriction and we must focus all our resources in improving that bottle neck. Any improvement we carry on in that bottle neck will generate more results than in any other place within your organization. Why? It has two reasons. The first one is because if just one extra thing flows thorugh this bottle neck you will increase directly your thoughtput. I mean, it doesn’t matter how good are you improving things in other part, if you don’t get a new sale then you didn’t improve anything. The second reason is “because you are attacking the problem directly”. It is like when you play pool. You hit the white ball with the stick, the white ball hit the next ball and so on. So you are hitting the last ball with less strenght than if you hit it directly. In our case, you will gett more results with the same resources if you “hit” (solve) your restriction directly.
Remember, your system has just ONE main restriction preventing your system from a higher throughput, and it changes everytime. Follow the next steps:
1. Identify the constraint (the thing that prevents the organization from obtaining more of the goal)
2. Decide how to exploit the constraint (make sure the constraint is doing things that the constraint uniquely does, and not doing things that it should not do)
3. Subordinate all other processes to above decision (align all other processes to the decision made above)
4. Elevate the constraint (if required, permanently increase capacity of the constraint; “buy more”)
5. If, as a result of these steps, the constraint has moved, return to Step 1. Don’t let inertia become the constraint.
Thanks Eli Goldratt for sharing your awesome ideas with us.
Relevant information in non-perfect enviroments
Posted on | November 11, 2008 | No Comments
If you lose more than 30 minutes a day analyzing your site its probably that you are not doing things as good as possibleMost of the people I know carry on the following analyzing process:
1- Login to the Web Analytics tool and I look at the traffic. If it looks similar to yesterday (or the same day from the last week), then we are ok. If the traffic is higher or lower, then I try to find why.
2- To find the “why” I look at the different reports and (if available) I cross data trying to get some insights. I also download the info to an excel file and keeps working on it there, since excel is more flexible. 3- I get so much information and things get more and more complicated. 4- I have lot of other things to do, so I leave everything as it is (still with no answer). 5- As the last possibility I ask people from other departments if they have any idea about that change in traffic. 6- Based on those answers and some interesting insights I´ve got, I infer the rest and get the answer that makes me feel more satisfied… Required time: 4 / 8 hours…(the rest of the people leave in the step 3).Even when it is true that the best thing we can do is integrating all the information in a main “repository”, allowing to answer all the question in the same place, it is also true that for some companies or persons it is not an option for both technical or time constrains. So what can we do if it is not possible to us a full integration? The simplest solution is having an agenda with al the activities are occurring in our company, not just ours, but from all the departments of functional areas. Companies are “systems” which mean a groups of things interconnected that work together with a unique mission. So if we modify one particular part of the system, we are also modifying the complete thing, and not just one part. Coming back to the agenda, why it is so important? Because, even when it won’t tell us immediately “why” we have an spike or drop in traffic, it will tell us immediately where can we find the answer. Example, we launch an Adwords campaign and in parallel our website get offline for an hour making that the spike in traffic from the Adwords campaign is counteracted by the offline time.Without an agenda with events or “milestones” the analysis would be: 1- Technology Department: Amazing, the server was down for about an hour but it had no impact to the site traffic. Don´t tell anyone!!!. 2- Marketing Department: The Adwords campaign generated no traffic!!!. 3- CEO: The traffic has no change, we are just great!!!. The event calendar gives the big picture making more efficient the analysis and decision making process.How can I have an event calendar (or agenda) when it is a non supported feature in my Web Analytics tool?The simplest option is having a Google Spreadsheet shared among your team. Simple and useful. You can also add this functionality that will export your Google Analytics report directly to Google Spreadsheet making your analysis even more flexible and simple. I hope you find this tip useful.
HOWA presents an Agenda full of interesting Case Studies
Posted on | October 14, 2008 | No Comments
Today HOWA (Hands on Web Analytics) presented the Event Agenda with case studies from Google, Telefónica, Intellignos, Despegar.com (presented by Resultics), ePEXO, Netadblog, SocialMetrix (and some others to be confirmed). 
Don’t lose the chance of being part of the first Web Analytics Event in Latam, where you will be hable to interact with the people who works “Hands on Web Analytics”.
Buenos Aires has its second Search Engine Marketing Expo (SMX Buenos Aires 2008)
Posted on | October 4, 2008 | 2 Comments
Finally we had the SMX Buenos Aires 2008 and in my opinions was pretty good.
The Analytics presentation was well balanced, a consultant (me), a Provider (Enrique Quevedo from Google) and a Client (Maria Soledad Santich from Telefónica de Argentina). I fount Soledad’s presentation very usefull since she explained how was the Analytics Implementing process in her company in a very transparent way. Issues, deviations, pursuit results, etc.
Juan Damia, Maria Soledad Santich and Enrique Quevedo
Guille (Google), Juan and Rita (Google)
The best
Even when I couldn´t attend all the presentations I wish, I attended some very good ones,
- Julio Fernandez with Online Reputation Management examples.
- Andres Snitcofsky with his very funny SEM (and instructive) presentation.
- German Herebia, talked about new media and give some ideas to present developers (If German tells you that you can get good money develping the mentioned type of apps, I recommend you going in that direction).
- Gustavo Saients and Alejandro Perez (I was a little late so I missed Robert Jacksons´ presentation) explained in a very simple way how the Search Engines Algorithms work in general.
- Martín Enriquez and his Online Reputation Management examples, very clear
The worst
- The security was poor making possible that not just one, but two laptos where stolen (I´m really sorry Justo and Diego).
- Some panelist presentations were sales presentations…come on some people paid a lot of money not to hear you selling your products, but to learn how to improve their services and make money by their self. Sorry guys, wrong place, wrong people….
I would also like to thanks Tomy Lorsch and Rafael Fernández Tamames the invitations to participate in the Analytics Panel.
Google Code - All you need to know about Google Analytics
Posted on | September 22, 2008 | 2 Comments
Google has launched a site focused on providing support to those needing measuring their sites in a more sofisiticated way. 
What can you find in Google Code? Lot of information about how to implement custom Analytics Installation on your site like “Change the longevity of your marketing campaigns“, “add a new search engine” to the list of those Analytics recognizes and “configuring tracking to use both Google Analytics and Urchin Software from Google“.If you are a Beta tester you can also find an entire section dedicated to Beta-testing event tracking. You can also find an E-commerce overview and E-commerce API reference. The sections “tracking code execution” and “how Analytics uses cookies” are just great.Great to hear that Google Analytics is getting smarter :-)
SMX lands again in Buenos Aires, with a Web Analytics Panel!
Posted on | September 11, 2008 | No Comments
The SMX Event is landing in Buenos Aires in its second edition. SMX is one of the most important “Search” events in the world, so if you work in something related, not just with “Search” but with Internet, you must attend it.This event is gonna be a very particular one, since it includes a the Web Analytics panel (yes, I said in Buenos Aires and Analytics in the same phrase 
) and I have the honor of being one of the three Web Analytics Panelists. The other two are Enrique Quevedo (from Google Analytics) and María Soledad Santich (Content and SVAs Internet- Marketing Speedy from Telefonica de Argentina).
Hug a developer today, Hilarious!!!
Posted on | September 11, 2008 | 1 Comment
Sad but true…
US Hispanics Advetising Spending
Posted on | August 27, 2008 | No Comments
I’ve read in E-Marketer a very interesting report from Advertising Age reported that last year US advertisers spent 64% of their Hispanic-targeted media budgets on Spanish-language broadcast and cable TV networks, while Internet display ads garnered less than 5%.
“Hispanic consumers under the age of 35 are spending more time online than watching TV—and are often doing both at the same time,” says Lisa E. Phillips, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, US Hispanic Media Usage. “Overall, Hispanics are heavy users of all digital media, embracing innovations more rapidly than non-Hispanic whites.”
According to the “Hispanic Syndicated Study” from Terra Networks, conducted by comScore Media Metrix, on a weekly basis, 96% of Hispanic Internet users spend at least an hour online, compared with 91% who spend more than an hour watching TV.
Thirty percent of respondents went online 13 or more hours a week, compared with 23% who watched the same amount of television.
Yet advertisers seeking to reach the Hispanic audience continue to spend far more on traditional media than on the Internet.
Ms. Phillips believes the tide will turn, however, toward more digital spending to reach Hispanics.
“Hispanics embrace new technology more rapidly than non-Hispanic whites and share it very freely with friends and family,” says Ms. Phillips. “Ownership and usage of several forms of portable media devices indicates this group of super-communicators will lead the uptake of mobile Internet and video in the US.”
She adds, “Savvy marketers won’t continue to ignore these trends much longer.”
Key Tips - Web Analytics for Blogs - Second part
Posted on | August 14, 2008 | No Comments
As promise, the second part “Interaction”.
Interaction: When you created your blog, you did it for a reason, an objective, so you should measure if that objective is being achieved or not. Whatever your objective is, it may be related with some kind of interaction between your audience and your blog (unless your objective is not being visited at all…like an autistic blogger ;-)) so, it is important to measure it. Let’s see how to do it:
a. Comments per post: This metric is as simple as useful; because it let you know if your posts are generating interaction among your readers. If you objective are interacting with your readers via comments, then this is your key metric. However if you just receive a few comments (or none) it doesn’t mean that your post was not successful. Some blogs give readers the space to leave comments while others don’t (consciously or unconsciously), so it really depends on you and your blog’s style. If you receive just a few (or none) comments per blog, I recommend asking your readers about it through a poll.
b. Comments per visit: This metric will allows you to find out the level of interaction between your readers and your blog. While comments per posts tell you how “interesting” was a particular post, Comments per visits tells you in average how interested are your users with your content.
c. Internal search per visit: Another way to know how interested your visitors are in your blog is by looking at their internal search behavior. Those users interested in your content will keep looking at other content. However I recommend you to understand the user experience, because some blogs has very smart “content recommenders” which makes people go jumping from content to content without even touching the search box.
Internal searches can provide you another key information, which content is “relevant or interesting” to your readers. Remember that the keywords used to get the site by organic search just tell you how your visitors were able to get your site (depends on if the site was or was not available with a particular keyword) while “internal search” tells you what are they looking for, not matter your site is visible in organic search with that keyword or not.
d. Average time per visit: No matter your blog’s structure (your blog displays the entire post in the home page or not) the Average time per visit helps you to understand if you are getting qualified visitors or not, and if your qualified visitors are interested in your content or not. If your visitors are not qualified you will have the most of your visitors in the segment of less than 30 seconds while the rest of the segments will remain flat or almost flat, however if your visitors are qualified but they are not finding interesting content then even when the less than 30 seconds visits segment will be the highest one, you will also have an interesting quantity of people in the 2 and 3 minutes segments.
e. Average time per page: I just mention this metric to make you be careful about it. The average time per page depends merely on the large and difficulty of the displayed content and not on how interesting or not would it be.
What you can do with this metric is analyzing the top 20 pages with the highest average time per page and try to determine if the one with the highest time has something in common. Once you did it that is the variable you may tune if you are looking to improve that metrics.
