Analytics 2.0

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Category Archives: Analytics 2.0

Towards Qualified Analytics Professionals

I always enjoyed my analyst role. The idea of trying to find answers in a mess of data and information sounds incredible challenging to me, it is probably (I guess) like an adventure game or something like that (I’m not a expert gamer so I don’t really know the name of those games ;-) ).

I’ve been an Analyst for more than 14 years and I’ve never got bored, actually the thing is getting even better. However for some reason some people believe that if you want to growth as a professional you have to climb up into the organization, which means, changing your role, which is in my opinion absurd…let me give you my reasons.

Whether if you are an Analyst, a Coder, or any other profile, you require some particular skills, mental model, and even values that are probably completely different that the ones you need to perform another role. Which means that you can be an awesome Analyst that enjoy his job with passion and when you get the “so important” promotion as a manager becoming a weak (and sad) Manager.

So, in my opinion the normal way of climbing up as (for instance) an Analyst should be becoming everyday a more experienced and qualified professional (you can call it Jr, Semi Sr, Sr, Mega Super Sr. and so on). I have a lot of reasons why:
1- You MUST enjoy your job.
2- A brilliant analyst must be paid for his performance. So if the person generates value to the company, the company must pay for it, you don’t need to call the person “Manager” or “VP” for that.
3- A brilliant analyst is not necessarily a brilliant Manager and the brilliant Manager is as necessary as the analyst.
4- All the companies need brilliant and passionate people on each position.
5- Since the company is a system (a group of things interacting together with a common objective) every single person in the organization is responsible for accomplishing the objectives, ergo, every position is crucial.

Think about it…

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Integration, where are you?

I’ve been my last two days at Adtech San Francisco and I was very surprised (and not) because  none of the Web Analytics Tools where there. Google was there just with Adwords, Yahoo! had no booth, Omniture had no booth neither, Coremetrics the same. Ok you can say, they are big so they don’t need to be there? So, should I think that Adwords is small? You can also say that some of the tools are free and they are part of other business (like Adwords and Google Analytics) and here is when we return to the begining. Information is what makes you generate forecasting scenarios. Without information you are not able to understand what is gonna happen in the future (with and acceptable level of confidence), if you are planning without information from the past then you are just guessing and I’m not sure that guessing could bring you to a acceptable level of confidence.
On the other hand companies like Omniture or Coremetrics where no present there neither, and they charge a lot of money for their services. This has really no explanation to me. I know that were some other analytics events on the region those days, but come on, we (Analytics professionals) are always talking about integration and cannot even share the same space with adveretisers and publishers? Please, is not about Analytics, or Paid Search, Or Organic search, is about Business and businesses require all those things togheter.
So why none of the biggest Web Analytics Companies had no presence? No idea…
Finally there are a lot of new Web Analytics Tools companies all over the world, it was a great opportunity to fill the Web Analytics emptiness left by the other companies… but nothing happened…I’m really confused.
We (Web Analytics professionals) are always saying that clients and agencies are not taking Web Analytics very seriously, but how would they take it seriously if we don’t do it?

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Analytics Ninjas vs Analytics James Bond

During the last HOWA Buenos Aires Mariano Amartino (one of the most recognized bloggers in the region) was presenting the topic Analytics & Bloggers. He agued that he is not an Analytics expert but just a guy that uses a couple of metrics and a lot of intuition to manage their blogs.

Actually I invited him to challenge us (people working in Analytics). You know, something like “I never used Analytics and I’m very successful”. I had the fantasy that if it is possible to be successful without Analytics then we had a lot to learn from…actually we could even understand why Analytics is not as much developed in this region as it should be.

Mariano’s presentation started and it seemed like he was really accomplishing his objective, he was not talking about Analytics at all…at least he was repeating that he never did Analytics in his life.

Some minutes later Mariano started to give more information about how he managed their projects and… voila! Analytics appeared. Even when he never said “I use/d Analytics” or “I carry on this technique” or what ever else, he begin to mention some activities that are Analytics activities but in an non formal way. Was he lying? I’m sure that he was not. The problem is that there is a lot of people that has an “Analytics Ninja” mind “by defauld”, I call them The Analytics James Bond. They say that they have no idea about Analytics but in fact they are really good Analytics practitioners.

The problem with this profiles is that they are not aware about what they do. Their Analytical mind works automatically, they ask and answer questions in their mind in an almost unconscious way and if you are not aware of what you do, you wont be able to teach other people, ergo the knowledge remains as the Analytics James Bond prisoner.

In my career in the Analytics industry I was face to face with a lot of Analytics James Bond believe me, at a first sight they seemed to be regular civilians but if you talk with them for a while you will get in the fact that they are not. So, stay alert, there are a lot of Analytics James bond trying to leave their knowledge behind bars, you mission is to unmask them and learn!

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Identifying site interactions, the Key for optimizing

If you would like to optimize your site performance it is key to first identify the interactions that a user could generate on it. To do so you must forget about the holistic vision of systems by the systemic vision (highly recommended to read Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline). The holistic vision says that in order to optimize each part of the system you need to optimize each part of the system while the systemic vision says that the important thing is to understanding and optimizing not the parts (or objects) but the interactions and not all the interactions but the one/s that are mainly constraining your website from a higher performance.
If your main website objective (every system must have a MAIN objective) is Sales Conversion, then you must find and understand what interactions that a user may generate could lead to a sale and try to optimize that interaction. When doing that remember to focus just on the main restriction do not spend unnecessary dollars on something that will not result in higher benefits. Think about your website has a pipeline, what must flows through it is your objective (sales, registrations, etc) and nothing else than that, not pageviews, not visits, not comments…just your objective. As much of your objective flows through your structure as much it will perform.

So, go ahead, let’s fall in love with your interactions ;-)

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“Understanding” – the hardest part of an Analytics Ninja work

One of the critical parts of an Analytics Ninja work is related with the way humans interact. Analytics Ninjas must understand what people need to make decisions and what they don’t. However, this task that seems to be pretty simple, in fact it is not.

First of all every human has a different mental model which process the information in a very particular way. The communication also differs based on gender, man and woman communicate in a very unique way.

Culture is something that pushes the differences among people. People from Argentina process the same information different than someone from the States (look other posts like “What’s a Latino?“, “Analytics, Focused on People?” and “Is time Just money?“.

All the above mentioned differences make our job very complex. Why? Because the first part of an Analytics Professional work is understanding the “System” and you wont be able to do that if you are not able to understand the way people communicate it to you.

So my suggestion is using the kid’s very same technique…the Why? Why? Why? Technique. Normally the less people talk the more they agree. This is usually desvastating…

I Leave you a very interesting video from the Monolog of Mark Gungor called the Tale of Two Brans, enjoy it!!!

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FIN Concept – Free is nothing

“I implemented Google Analytics because is free” is one of the most trite phrases this days in the Internet Industry and let me introduce you the FIN Concept…Free is Nothing.

Do you thing that Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics or any other tool is free just because your don’t have to pay for them? That is not correct and I’ll show you why… Continue reading →

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Is there such thing as a Website?

During my last presentation at the Web Analytics Day I asked the attendees “What is a Website”? and just one or two persons where able to hardly answer. This is not weird, it is based on the way humans learn. We tend to learn things just once and then we just repeat what we’ve learnt. So when we think we know something we just stop asking “why” and the learning process is done. That represents a very danger behavior when the learnt knowledge is not so.

In this case nobody asked themselves what a website is because everybody thought they knew it…until someone (me) ask it and they finds out that there is no answer on their mouth ;-) .

The answers of my question was “There is nothing called website per se” it depend on how you define it. I mean, it could be:
1- A domain with a single page.
2- A domain with several pages.
3- Several domains with a single page.
4- Several domains with multiple pages.
5- Several domains and/or domains with single or multiple pages.

So my concern is, how would you be able to implement you analytics tool when you don’t even know what your website is ;-) …you wouldn’t and that’s the point. So…do you already know what your website is?
For more information you can download the presentation much more than just tagging

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