Variable Markup

I’ve been playing around with the data visualization tools at IBM’s Many Eye’s project and came up with a visualization in a treeview that shows the top 500+ ecommerce sites split by category of retailer with google page rank.  It’s an interesting way to look at the data as you quickly see that apparel & accessories dominates number of retailers in the top 500.  Following the apparel category is Specialty/Non-Apparel, Housewares, and Computers/Electronics. 

 An alternative interesting view can be see by dragging the retail vertical to the position between google page range and site.  This will group everything by page rank showing that there’s only 4 retailers with a GPR of 9. 

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage. (continue reading…)

Avinash Kaushik worked at Intuit as the Director of Web Research & Analytics on their 60+ web properties and is currently an independent consultant working for companies like Google. He is the author of a recently released book called Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.  

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Avinash about retailers use of web analytics. Join me in this Q and A session as he explains how retailers can get the most from their analytics.

What is the toughest challenge today that a retailer faces related to web analytics?

Overcoming the perception that web analytics by itself will solve all their data / decision making problems.

Most retailers, I think, “get it” that they need data and they have web analytics tools. The challenge is that they think just torturing that data enough will give them all the insights they need. The reality is that they probably need more than one tool and they need people/skills to be able to leverage those tools.

(continue reading…)