Online Retailers See 29% Surge in `Black Friday' Visitors

New York -- Web traffic to online retailers on Black Friday -- the traditional start
of the holiday shopping season -- shot up 29% from a year ago, according to
new figures from Internet research firm Nielsen//NetRatings. The firm said
that its 100 representative online retailers brought in 17.2 million unique
visitors, up from 13.3 million a year ago. "While many shoppers headed out to
the stores over the weekend, the majority first turned to the Internet to check
prices and product availability," said Heather Dougherty, a senior retail analyst
with Nielsen//NetRatings. EBay was the top online retailer, with 9.5 million
unique visitors, followed by Amazon and Wal-Mart Stores, which drew 4.6
million and 3.4 million unique visitors, respectively. Target and BestBuy.com
rounded out the top five. Target, Wal-Mart and Circuit City, which offered deep
discounts on selected items on Friday,  saw traffic to their sites more than
double from the previous Friday. 
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp?section=new_pr

Comments

[Tamara]

This is such an interesting chart when you look back only three years and we had close to a dozen top eienngs. Remember Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, and others that are now little more than a memory?Almost everyone is optimizing for Google because that's where most of the searchers are.Another interesting point At one time your Google rank was pretty much synonymous with your Yahoo position. No longer is this the case at all.In fact I'm not sure what the big Y is up to right now but I'm finding it tough to get rank on that engine, and easier than ever to climb the charts on Goo. Who knows what willhappen next as these companies continue to alter their algorithms in an effort to keep marketers off balance and compete with one another for the ultimate search tool.

[Suhila]

Glen Barnes,Just curious about your NetRatings syetsm, because it appears to me that it uses very simple statistical functionalities (descriptive statistics) for its analysis. Correct me if I am wrong here, that NetRatings only does simple analysis and not the advanced methods that can give your clients a deep understanding of their data. I can pick perhaps 3 obvious analytical techniques that are missing from NetRatings :#1) It can't do time-series sub-sequence matching of surfing behavior (matching one time-series to another one or to a group of other time-series to find out which is the closest match). Looking at those graphs above, there is no way to tell which time-series that have the same co-movement with which other series. This is important as the analyst can pick out important patterns.#2) It can't do sequential pattern extraction of users surfing sequence in a website. This is important that you can track the behavior of users. It gives the analyst the capability to see if there is a need for improvement of the website design, since there is emerging pattern from the log data that shows a high rate of a repeated sequence. #3) I don't know whether you syetsm cluster users according to their browsing behavior. It is important to know this, since you can automatically predict what similar users going to be doing when they come to the website. For e-commerce , you can recommend products to such users who belong to same clusters (same browsing & buying behavior).I understand that your syetsm is developed in Australia, if you want more info on advanced data analysis, then I am happy to point you out to more info regarding those techniques.SPSS has a web-analytic (web-mining) product, which they are moving in to those territory that NetRatings is occupying. All the functionalities I have listed above and other advanced analysis methods are already implemented by SPSS. SPSS is a data-mining vendor so, they will implement the latest state-of-the-art web analytic algorithms that appear in literatures.