Carlos Diogo Homepage

In order to improve the sustainability of the company by the end of the year 2007, we decided to move the focus from the Baratix comparison engine and  offer services on the web marketing area. By then we have had some very profitable mailing campaigns and therefore it was considered to be the logic step. 

If initially the strategy was to offer the services as a complement of a site building or web presence management package soon we realized that building sites was not profitable and we should leave that to other companies. Adclick had positioned it self as a Lead creator and manager using the several channels available . 

The most effective channel was the mailing. Mailing was a simple, fast and cheap way of generating leads. However over time this proved to be tricky and even problematic as often the emails were considered spam and soon our ips and domains were blacklisted , limiting our mail sending capabilities.

This problem caused us to focus more on the other cannels specialy Search Engine Optimization , Adwords optimization and Afilliation networks. By the end of the year 2008 the results were within the aceptable range.

If the results of 2008 were ok for me , the strategy the majority decided to pursue, did not meet my expectations and therefore on the beginning of 2009 i decided to sell my participation on the company.

On January 2007 me a three other persons created the start-up Adclick lda. How idea was to implement a price comparison website for the Portuguese retail market.

Price comparison websites where booming in other countries like US , UK and Germany and in Portugal there was still no players.  The time seemed right as online retail stores were being created daily and the stores would have the need a ground to compete with the established big retailers.

Our original focus was the Electronics and Computers market. The reasons was the amount of stores that already existed online that would cause stores to pay for customer, the fact that this were standard products which would reduce the technological effort into mapping the products from the stores  and the fact that these goods were typically the ones that the consumer would buy online.

The first stage was to analyze existing  shop comparison engines in different country and design the core comparison engine.

The sourcing of the data for the comparison was through web-parsers that would retrieve the product information from the stores websites and store it on and defined format. The web-parser technology we used had been previously developed by me for a previous project and offered reliable results. The second phase of the project was the design of the back-office platform that would manage the web-parsers and then work on the data to serve the comparison engine.

My role in the project was deeply involved on the design as the development was made by another member of the team.

The comparison engine was set to productive on October 2007 and by the end of the year the results were bad. We where not been able to either generate traffic to the site and also we were not able to convince the stores to spend money on us.