What Works

This is a graphic generated by one of google’s trend analysis tools. I simply typed in the web addresses I was curious about and google graphed their relative traffic patterns, using the first page I entered to set the scale. In their words, this is what the tool does: “Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. “ If I were you, I would ignore the value of the scale and just keep in mind that it is relative. We’re measuring not total volume, but the volume of these four sites relative to one another.

Amazon clearly has far more traffic than the other three sites. Because walmart, target, and kmart rely on their physical stores, just looking at this web traffic does not tell you much about relative sales. I don’t who else is like me, but I often use amazon as a sort of loosely organized reference site, finding it faster to look their for publication dates of books than to go to my library’s site or fish the book off my shelf. I might be an outlier in this regard – most people don’t spend time every day wondering about publication dates – but there is probably a fair amount of traffic on amazon related to their product reviews that may not result in sales at amazon. All of this activity generates traffic, not sales. All three of the other retailers also feature customer reviews, by the way.

What works here is sort of unclear. On the one hand, just look at how similar walmart.com and target.com are. They track each other so closely they are visually difficult to distinguish. And just look at how important the holidays are to all these retailers.

The city data relies heavily on which website is input into the search field first. Seattle might not have even been included if I had put walmart.com first, but many cities in the south would have been. Minneapolis would be up there if I had put target.com first. kmart.com first motivates Philly to the front of the pack.

What Needs Work

My biggest critique of this sort of thing is that it’s unclear what the heck to take from it. If you are just trying to beat some competitor, having google show you their relative traffic is immensely useful. But what else is this good for? Anyone?

Let me just point out that this only works for large sites. Google can’t tell us much about the vast sea of smaller sites.

Open Access – Transparency

In the end, though, the move towards making data publicly available is fabulous. I can’t see how this particular instance is broadly useful to me – it’s fascinating, sure, could be good for marketing departments internal to these companies, but then what? My confusion just means that I am a short-sighted fool. Google should be applauded for creating a non-prescriptive tool to explore the data they have that is so basic it can be used by anyone for who knows what.

Relevant Resources

Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Google Trends Information.

Google Trends the digital widget or digi-wigi.

Himanen, P. (2001) The Hacker Ethic. New York: Random House.

Raymond, E. (2001) The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.