Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters by Bill Tancer
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(Hardcover)
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- ISBN: 1401323049
- Publisher: Hyperion
- Pub. Date: September 2008
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Comments from the Seller: 2008 Paperback Fine Hyperion 2008 SOFTCOVER. Prerelease version. Glossy pictorial wraps. From Do Americans really spend that much time surfing porn sites Which demographic visited Anna Nicole Smith's Web site most frequently Who reads Perez Hilton More than mere trivia nuggets, the answers to these questions define online behaviors among a varied mix of Internet users. Tancer, who leads global research at Hitwise, an online market research company, guides the reader through the search patterns among 10 million Internet users, challenging myths and making new discoveries about the psychology of consumers, illustrating that clicks speak louder than words and can reveal unspoken truths about individual drives that are not expressed via other forms of media. Everyone from marketing managers who want to know how much power social networking sites wield in the online market to political pollsters trying to decipher the disconnect between exit polls and election results would be advised to heed his research. Wi
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Synopsis
In Click, Bill Tancer takes us behind the scenes into the massive database of online intelligence to reveal the naked truth about how we use the Web, navigate to sites, and search for information - and what all of that says about who we are. Tancer demonstrates how the Internet is changing the way we absorb information and how understanding that change can be used to our advantage in business and in life.
Publishers Weekly
Do Americans really spend that much time surfing porn sites? Which demographic visited Anna Nicole Smith's Web site most frequently? Who reads Perez Hilton? More than mere trivia nuggets, the answers to these questions define online behaviors among a varied mix of Internet users. Tancer, who leads global research at Hitwise, an online market research company, guides the reader through the search patterns among 10 million Internet users, challenging myths and making new discoveries about the psychology of consumers, illustrating that clicks speak louder than words and can reveal unspoken truths about individual drives that are not expressed via other forms of media. Everyone from marketing managers who want to know how much power social networking sites wield in the online market to political pollsters trying to decipher the disconnect between exit polls and election results would be advised to heed his research. Witty and invaluable in its insights, this book is destined to become a primer for online marketers and usability experts while shedding new light on the mindset and curiosities of the average Web surfer, i.e., your friends and neighbors. (Sept.)
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Very Inormativeby Barbara70
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04/20/2009: Very interesting reading and will probably be a very useful resource for my E-Business classes in school. It is also helpful knowledge for research and marketing applications. It offers insight to consumer behavior online which obviously is different from classic retail and even mail order.
clickstream analysisby Anonymous
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08/27/2008: Tancer explains in a readable and intuitive manner the importance of clickstream analysis. This refers to capturing the Internet traffic of millions of users as they troll the Internet. Typically, they will be using a browser, and going to various URLs and clicking on links in downloaded pages, to in turn go to other URLs. This is combined with the very important special case where users go to a search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) and then enter queries. The author works for a company that has agreements with various ISPs that gives it access to clickstream traffic, suitably anonymised. The company has this for some 10 million users. From this aggregate, Tancer describes what might be gleaned. He does this by giving examples and anecdotes possibly deprecating a lot of math analysis. It is unclear how sophisticated the analysis is, in terms of automated algorithms. The logic in his examples is impressive, but seems mostly done at the highest wetware level, ie. manual pattern recognition. One piognant moment shines through. He looks at users making relationship related queries to search engines. 'Some of us are so troubled by our interpersonal relationships that, out of desperation, we've chosen to look to the computer servers, algorithms and indexes take make up a search engine to find the answer to our failures'. You might recall Eliza, the psychology program at MIT in the 70s. Purely text based, which, come to think of it, is what most of today's search engines are, for typical queries and results. The people who used Eliza knew that it was just a program. Some confided in it anyway, as though it was a real friend. Granted, the interplay between today's user and a search engine does not have the same mediative style. But it is as though on a much vaster scale, millions have turned to search engines for therapy. Sadly, the book does have some blemishes. Tancer uses the word 'lurker' to describe those who just go to a social network and consume what is offered, as opposed to more creative types who upload content to it. The word is ill chosen, bearing connotations of stalking. Perhaps it was picked for its colourfulness? But the people who do this 'lurking' are the vast majority of users, who do not have any bad intent. Their actions or inactions are little different from an early generation of people who watched a lot of TV. The term for the latter is couch potatoes. Far more annoying are the figures in the book. These graphs and tables have the letters FPO in large bold type imprinted in the centre. Maybe if the figures were on a webpage, this might have been ok, due to the ease with which a viewer can copy them with a browser. But on a printed page, it screws up the visual experience. Another gripe is the poor quality of what we can discern in the figures. They are low resolution screen captures. Text is hard to read. Also, when the figures are graphs, there are often 2 or more curves. There is a legend at the bottom that indicates what each curve means. But the curves are often hard to distinguish.
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