Regardless on what your stance is on the US healthcare debate, it sure is interesting to look at data about it.I’ve recently been experimenting with Tableau for doing data analysis. In short it is fast and awesome for finding new ways of looking at massive data tables. Ways that can actually provide insight.This table below shows the distributions of money, influence and the uninsured. It is disturbing how well the campaign contribution amounts correlate to the way the distribution of the votes.
Most of this is a moot point though, without a public option there isn’t going to be the competition required to make health care affordable for many Americans.Thanks to Tableau, the Washington Post and Map Light for the data.
Being brought up as a farm boy, I like to think of web real estate in terms of farm real estate. Find fertile grounds; nurture them to derive the most optimal output that will fetch the greatest value on the market. Web real estate is the same, only without and geographic boundaries.
Use analytics to identify the fertile ground. Structure your creative proposition to be planted on this real estate (and the real estate along the conversion funnel) such that it will return the greatest fruit bearing yield. Learn from historical trends and evolve methodologies. This metaphor lends itself to an even more important lesson for retailers – you’ll grow more fruit if you plant seeds in places other than your backyard.
Traditional retailers are reclaiming the ground lost to ‘e-tailers’ (online only retailers) over the past few years, with over 3.5 million unique visitors searching catalogues online for in-store offers over the December shopping period.
Bricks-and-mortar retailers reclaimed market share from e-tailers over the Christmas shopping period, with more than 3.5 million unique visitors searching the catalogues of retailers published on Salmat DigitalForce’s Lasoo.com.au and Dynamic Catalogue platforms during December.
The figure is an aggregated total of unique visitors throughout the month to Lasoo.com.au and the 20-plus Dynamic Catalogues hosted within the sites of individual retailers, including major brands such as Target, BIG W, Myer and Dick Smith.
Previous Christmas retail periods indicated a trend towards consumers engaging more with e-tailers’ at the expense of the bricks and mortar retail brands. This was largely attributable to the fact that time-poor consumers were easily able to find exactly what they were looking for on the internet from the online retailers, while traditional retailers struggled to make their brands and offers discoverable online.
Since the November 2007 launch of Lasoo.com.au, which allows consumers to search catalogues and offers from various retailers; and Dynamic Catalogue, a managed catalogue hosting solution that sits within the retailer’s own site; offline retailers have had an effective way of making their catalogue offers visible to consumers online. What’s more, the technology behind Lasoo.com.au and Dynamic Catalogue allows these offers to appear towards the top of search results from search engines such as Google. Until Lasoo and Dynamic Catalogue, these search results pages were previously dominated by e-tailers.
Pre-Shopping has become a growing trend for online shoppers seeking instant gratification, as witnessed by e-tailers with conversion rates around 1% to 4%. Retailers have capitalised on the behaviour in 2008, clocking up a 24% conversion rate from online–to-offline transactions.
Lasoo analysed Hitwise data by comparing a custom category of the Top 25 Retailers (traditional bricks and mortar retailers) against a custom category of top 25 E-tailers (pure online retailers) based on market share of Australian Internet visits. As a result the year-on-year comparison of the market share of traditional retailers v e-tailers[1] during Q4 clearly demonstrates this trend, with the retailer Christmas traffic surpassing the benchmark previously set by e-tailers as they now seem to have reached a ceiling over the last 2 years.
E-Tailers vs Retailers Q4 06
Etailer vs Retailer Q4 07
Etailer vs Retailer Q4 08
[1] Using custom categories (see endnote) comparing weekly visits against traffic in “All Categories”
