¿Swiming, floating or sinking in water? CMO’s & Analytics

Some months ago I’ve received a report called ” The Global Chief Marketing Officer Study” from IBM and I wanted to share with you some of the most interesting facts from it. The report is based on a research carried on to 1700 CMO’s from all over the world.

The reports shows that the main focus of the CMOs is the ROI. Almost two thirds of CMOs believe that the return on investment in marketing will become the main metric of effectiveness before 2015.

They recognize, as do the CEOs, that the world in which they operate is much more volatile, uncertain and complex.

A whole 79% of the surveyed CMOs believe that
the level of complexity will be high or very high in the next five years and only 48% feel prepared to face it.

The intersting thing is that when they where asked about what’s the main concern, over 70% of CMOs believe they are not fully prepared to deal with the increase in volume of data and its impact.
‘One of our biggest challenges is the data analysis. Because of the complexity and size of our organization, we are left behind, “admitted a CMO from the consumer products sector in the United States.

It certainly is not the only one. ‘We are drowning in data. We lack of real information’, commented a CMO from Switzerland. A CMO’s from the energy and supplies sector from Holland expressed the problem more bluntly: ‘At this time, we have no idea how our marketing department will deal with the increase of data’.

The volume of information is drowning us…probably is time think about Corporative Analytics Strategies…

Meta Analytics is heading to the GAUC México

The next 25th of April I’ll lading in Mexico to participate as speaker at the 1st GAUC (Google Analytics User Conference) in México. The objective is to encourage the meeting of Google Analytics users, consultants and experts of the Digital Analytics industry in Latin America. The event promotes the interaction between Google Analytics users to share experiences, learn new and advanced features, and last but not least on the importance of measuring the Internet.

My conference will be “Meta Analytics: How to optimize the flow of money using the information from Google Analytics”. In most cases people analyze the online information in an isolated way making very hard to identify where the resource that is preventing or restricting the site to increase it’s benefits (money) is. Meta Analytics introduces two key concepts, the idea identifying the interactions of the analyzed systems as the most important source of information and the comprehension of the human mind which is the responsable of analyzing the information. The human mind is always willing to play tricks on you unless you are ready to play the game…so…are you ready?

Congratulations Francisco Pellat and all the people working behind the scene for the exquisite organization!

Welcome NYU to Argentina

A few weeks ago I was invited by the Universidad de Palermo to talk about entrepreneurship for 220 NYU’s Business Students. The other speakers where John Hudson, Luis Navas (Conexia) and Rodolfo Montes de Oca (Zott).

John Hudson, CEA Global Education Argentina, was talking about “Cultural and consumer behavior differences between USA and Latin America” while Luis, Rodolfo and me were talking about “Starting up a Business in Argentina: Challenges and opportunities” (We are all Endeavor Entrepreneurs). Xiao Ma, NYU student said “It was very useful to attend these talks, the economies of Argentina and the United States are very different, here is more difficult but also makes the challenge even more interesting and creative“.

Measuring Churn Rate for non opt-out business

Churn Rate (sometimes called attrition rate) is a very useful metric, that measures the number of individuals or items moving into or out of a collective over a specific period of time. Churn rate, when applied to a customer base, refers to the proportion of contractual customers or subscribers who leave a supplier during a given time period. It is a possible indicator of customer dissatisfaction, cheaper and/or better offers from the competition, more successful sales and/or marketing by the competition, or reasons having to do with the customer life cycle (Wikipedia).

So if you work in a company that provides mobile phoning services, you will count the churn rate as the quantity of clients that leaves the services in an specific period of time. Simple and sweet.

Our friend Albert Einstein said once “In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they are not“. So let’s go for some of those case in which Churn Rate is not that easy and sweet.

If you have a community website and wanted to measure the Churn Rate of your community, how can you determine that a particular user is leaving your community?. I mean, the opt-out in a newsletter is not a Churn…in communities the user don’t tell you “I’m leaving your community”, so…how can you measure your churn rate?

Probably there are many ways, I’ll tell you mine. Snoop your database looking for the period in which the 80% of the leavers don’t come back again. So, let’s say you start snooping from February 2011 (Last year). In January 100 people login into your site but they didn’t login in February. From now on, we have to take those for our analysis.

1- From those 100 users, 10 login again in march.

2- From those, 5 login again in april.

3- From those, 5 login some day between Jun and (‘current_date’).

4- 80% of the original analyzed population never came back again.

So we can count as our Churn users those who login last time three month ago. Let’s say that three month ago was last January 2012, then your query should something like Where (‘last_login’) between (’01-01-2012′) and (’01-31-2012′).

So, now you have one of the most important metrics for the KPI Churn Rate. The other metric you will need to calculate the KPI is the quantity of your database during the same period of time. That is simple, just run a query where last login is from (‘registration_date’) to (‘three_month_ago’).

CR = Churn / Users in Database

So, what’s your Churn Rate?

See you at eMetrics Chicago

Next June (from the 24th to the 26th) I’ll visiting Chicago, besides of being exited about the opportunity of going to the Buddy Guy’s Legend Bar (Always is a good moment for listening my favorite music) I’ve also the honor of being one of the speakers at eMetrics Chicago. For those who are not familiar with eMetrics, it is the most important Analytics’ event (or Digital Analytics ) founded by Jim Sterne (Also one of the founders of the Digital Analytics Association and serial Book’s Writer).

If you want to go today is the last day for the super early bird prices, visit the eMetrics Chicago registration page and buy your full access ticket.

See you there!

Goodbye Web Analytics, welcome Digital Analytics!

As you probably know, the Organization that joins the efforts of the Analytics professionals from the world regarding standards, best practices, Ethics, etc, is the Web Analytics Association. The Web Analytics Association born in 2003 when the abundant enthusiasm for an independent web analytics organization was readily apparent after only one evening in the lobby bar at the 2003 Emetrics Summit in Santa Barbara… Hundreds of phone calls and thousands of emails later, the three founders made the idea legal and convinced Seth Romanow from HP, search marketer Andrea Hadley, and web analytics executives Rand Schulman (WebSideStory) and Greg Drew (WebTrends) to join the inaugural board.

The first Board of Directors’ meeting was held in Portland, Oregon in the Summer of 2004 preceded by another gathering in another lobby bar…. (More History here)

About eight years later it is changing its name to Digital Analytics Association. Why? Well, the industry is moving very fast, if you are an analyst you know that the information must be analyzed in context, in this case the context is all. In 2003/2004 the Analytics World was completely different and the online world was another completely different thing. Internet was a sum of websites, most of the people had no idea what web analytics was, KPI’s was something that people was talking about but most of them where not very useful, Google Analytics (Today’s market leader in quantity of accounts) was not even in the market, actually Urchin was not even acquired by Google yet. Take a look at the WA Memorabilia from 2003

Well, I guess that the above is clear enough to understands that in 2003/2004 the Online World was totally different, that’s why the term Web Analytics became a little small and non-representative of what a today’s Analyst does (I wrote about it in the Post “Web Analytics, Digital Analytics…Why don’t we keep it simple“. So some time ago we started, from the WAA (Current DAA) looking for a new name that represents our work. Jim Sterne, chairman of the board and founder of the organization, announced the rebranding effort at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco (2012). The new positioning reflects the focus of the not-for-profit, volunteer-powered association created to unite professionals in a common effort to enhance the capabilities of data analytics and address the challenges associated with turning big data into business intelligence.

So, welcome Digital Analytics Association! Watch Jim Stern’s announcement video here

The Yahoo! Web Analytics Merchandising Report

If you have an eCommerce project and have installed Yahoo! Web Analytics, or you haven’t but you are thinking about implementing it I drop you some interesting tips about the Merchandising Report.

The Merchandising report it’s an awesome additional reporting solution if you already have the eCommerce report installed.

With the Yahoo! Web Analytics Merchandise Report you will be able to track not just the regular stuff from each sale like the individual products your customers preview, add to their shopping cart and purchase but also it allows you to define categories for your products, create custom reports, and update your reports to reflect cancelled orders or changes to order amounts by sending API requests to the system, and even doing up selling / cross selling analysis. You can also upload your individual products costs and calculate how each campaign contributes to your profits.

Yahoo! Web Analytics implementation is pretty simple if you, at least, take a look at the manual . The merchandising report has the very same logic, you simple add functions to your tracking code like:

Action;
DocumentGroup;
Amount; setAmounts records the total price of a product (i.e., the individual price of an item multiplied by the total number of units of the respective item).
OrderId;
Discount;
Tax;
Shipping;
SKU; Corresponds to the specific products you wish to track. The product SKU information is usually expressed as a function employed by your shopping cart. However, it can also be expressed as a constant (e.g., TEN114/S/03)

It is important to mention that each Yahoo! Web Analytics function is used to inflate a function from your shopping cart. Since shopping carts have different setups, you need to be familiar with the functions used in your shopping cart.

Another interesting feature is “Tracking viewed products“. By adding the ‘PRODUCT_VIEW’ action to your action function, as in the following example, you can track how often potential customer view your products and which products are the most popular.

YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW”);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422″);

If you wanted to track more product views at the same time you can just do the following:

YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW”);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422;H09273923″);

Another feature that you will love is ADD TO CART TRACKING. By activating this feature (you simply add the ADD_TO_CART action to your action function, as in the following example) you can track which products your visitors added to their online shopping cart.

YWATracker.setAction(“ADD_TO_CART”);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422″);

Important: The SKU does not have to include a letter and eight digits. It can be any combination of letters and numbers that you use to identify your products.

So we measured the viewed products, the added to cart products and now you can also track the Purchased products. To do so you simply activate the Sale action (01) action, as in the following example:

YWATracker.setAction(“01″);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422″);
YWATracker.setUnits(“3″);
YWATracker.setAmounts(“300.00″);
YWATracker.setAmount(“EUR300.00″);
YWATracker.setOrderId(“123xxx”);

If the tracked currency is important to you, let me suggest you to take a look at this link where you will find the total currencies supported by Yahoo! Web Analytics

To enter the price of your purchased products, you need to use the setAmounts function. Unlike the setAmount function, the setAmounts function does not need to have the currency code entered, as the currency is inherited from the setAmount function.
You can also track more products purchased at the same time:

YWATracker.setAction(“01″);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422;H09273923″);
YWATracker.setUnits(“3;1″);
YWATracker.setAmounts(“300.00;50.00″);
YWATracker.setAmount(“EUR350.00″);
YWATracker.setOrderId(“123xxx”);

One fantastic thing in Yahoo! Web Analytics is that the Tracking code has a very simple logic that it is replied in all the tracking functions. So once you understand the basics is not hard at all implementing another features.

Understanding the Argentinian Market – A great video from Endeavor

Endeavor, the organization that transforms emerging markets by supporting High-Impact Entrepreneurs, just produced and published a video called “The Multiplier Effect: How a Network of Entrepreneurs Created a Tech Sector in Argentina” that allows you a very good understanding of our industry and my country. This is not directly related to Analytics but I really recommend you to take a look at it.

Campaign Attribution in Google Analytics

In this post I’ll talk about how Google Analytics attributes a conversion, technically talking. This is not about how you should analyze conversion attribution, if you are interested in that I suggest you to visit Constraint Management vs Direct Attribution.

Google Analytics, as the other Web Analytics solutions allows you to identify from which source each conversion came from. Each platform has a particular attribution definition, ergo, it attributes the conversions in a very particular way and could or could not be the same as any other tool you may use. The key, as always in digital measurement, is identifying how the platform processes the information.

Google Analytics attributes the conversion to the most recent campaign by default, unless the second session’s traffic source it is a Direct Visit. Direct Visits won’t take credit from a previous referring campaign.

If you prefer to attribute the conversion to the very fist campaign, instead of the most recent, then you have to use a new query parameter into the query string of your campaign. If this is the case, then the query parameter to be used is “utm_nooverride=1“. If you do so, when a previous visit that cames from Campaign 1 cames back by clicking in Campaign 2 and converts, this conversion will be attributed to Campaign 1 instead of Campaign 2 as would do Google Analytics by default.

However, if for some reason the same visitor from Campaign 1 and 2 cames back but in this case from Campaign 3 without the parameter “utm_nooverride=1″ then the conversion will be attributed to Campaign 3.

What’s the best way of attributing Conversions? It isn’t a best way, it depends on what makes sense to you based on which decisions you make and how you do it, take a look at the post suggested above.

Analytics Interview to Mercado Libre’s CTO Daniel Rabinovich

After the presentation I shared with you in my previous post I felt that I need more information from the CTO of Mercado Libre Daniel Rabinovich. So I invited him to an interview.

A little background about Daniel:

Daniel landed in Mercado Libre far in the year 2000 as Senior Developer. In just two years he was promoted to the Software Architect position to be promoted again in 2003 to the Software Developer Manager position. He worked in that position un till 2007 when he was promoted again, in this case to the Software Developer Director position, then to the Product Development VP position in 2009.

Since the last year is the brand new Mercado Libre’s CTO. That’s Daniel, he looks like he is relaxed but at the same time he is making tons of things happen .

Well…here we go with the interview:

Juan: How is the daily work of capturing and processing in an organization with the volumes of traffic like Mercado Libre?

DR: Let’s imagine a “Maslow Pyramid of information”. At the bottom you have the most basic information useful to survive, to keep the website working properly. Climbing to the top, we switch to most sophisticated metrics related to speed, segments (mobile/desktop, organic/external, etc), flow analysis. At the top of the Pyramid you find the processed information that allows real positive product improvements. For instance the automatic optimization of the internal search engine.

Juan: Where to start?

DR: From the bottom First is important to ensure the operation, the storage and the consistency of the generated information at all levels.

Juan: Do you have any example of an Insight that generated a huge positive impact for Mercado Libre?

DR: The grossest one I remember was starting to measure the perceived speed of our listings by the users. Was 18 seconds! Reduce that time to less than one third of it generated a direct and impressive acceleration in our business metrics.

Juan: Information or “business intuition”? What is more important?

DR: Both are important, Information is only useful when handled by people who understand the business in addition to common sense.

Juan: How should technology and marketing integrate their activities to generate the optimal implementation of an information system?

DR: In the hardest way: By working as a unit. If both areas work as separated things it is not possible to achieve a good result.

Juan: What’s your preferred book?

DR: Judging by the number of times I read it, should be “Think like a grandmaster” by Alexander Kotov.

Juan: What’s your place in the world?

DR: My favorite place is the “Delta del Río de la Plata”.

Thanks so much Dani for your time and the information you’ve shared with us.

You can follow Daniel in his twitter account @drabinovich

Analytics 2.0

Much more than just tagging