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According to the Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Online Retail report (that’s a mouthful), here are the top 10 online retailers by June conversion rates:

1-800-Flowers
19.4%

Lands’ End
18.4%

Victoria’s Secret
14.5%

L.L. Bean
14.1%

QVC
13.7%

eBay
13.6%

Amazon
12.2%

Proflowers
11.9%

Barnes & Noble
11.1%

Crate and Barrel
11.0%

These seem low to me. After all, people are going to these sites to buy things, right? They might be doing some comparison shopping, but [...]

Yesterday a couple of packages arrived in the mail from O’Reilly. Each one had a copy of Web Site Measurement Hacks. When author Eric Peterson asked me if I’d be willing to write up a hack on using network sniffing, I said sure! At least I can contribute something I know a little [...]

If you’ve seen my About page, you know I don’t pay attention to my blog stats. I mean, I do care about visitors and referrers. I get referrer info from places like PubSub, so they show up in my RSS reader. I don’t really care about visitors as much as I care about participants. [...]

DMNews has an interview today with Jupiter analyst Eric Peterson. Worth a read.

Well, I see that after a long slumber, A List Apart is back, with a new look and a new outlook. So I’m back too.
I updated to the latest version of WordPress, and changed the look of the blog. That default was ready for a change. There are dozens of things about the new look [...]

This is old news, but hasn’t been announced anywhere, so …
Yahoo! has joined the Web Analytics Association as a Founding Corporate Member.
If you look at the bottom of the WAA home page you’ll see logos from the other founding corporate members. Except for Yahoo, they are all vendors of web analytics software. So [...]

In an era when web analytics ASPs are looking for any advantage, positioning yourself as a domain expert by publishing syndicated research data - and perhaps even charging for it - looks like a safe side business.
To that end, Fireclick announced that they’re providing a site for free distribution of a number of metrics. [...]

I was recently told
I looked at your ‘about’ page. it’s more about what you do than who you are.
Fair enough, and a good observation. But how does one define who one is? I’m thinking specifically about web analytics and user tracking. We want to provide compelling content (or products, services, etc) that engage users. The [...]

Today Yahoo! announced that Usama Fayyad, he Of Many Titles (Ph.D., SVP, Chief Data Officer, head of Yahoo Research Labs…) has been named a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
I was in a project review meeting with him yesterday and he was right on top of things: asking detailed questions and referencing algorithms, [...]

I’ve been reading lots of stories about Yahoo! vs. Google. No doubt the Clash of the Titans saga makes for good copy, and yes, of course there are folks within Yahoo who are fixated on Google.
But as yesterday’s earnings results show, Yahoo! is a lot more than search. I don’t sit in on other [...]

The Salt Lake Trib has the story.
A $40M investment, led by Bank of America Venture Partners. Hummer Winblad came in again. Valuation at least $200M post. They needed the cash .. number of employees tripled in the last 12 months and they intend to hit 600 in the next 12. If I assume [...]

It’s been said everyone has at least one book in them.
The irrepressible Eric Peterson, he of the self-published book as well as a (soon-to-be) published by O’Reilly book, has decided he needs to write another. In the spirit of information wanting to be free (and perhaps getting some early arrows that will sharpen the [...]

Wi-Fi Planet, part of the Jupiter Media keiretsu, reports on a Jupiter Research study that claims municipal Wi-Fi (wireless) costs about US$150,000 per square mile over 5 years, and wouldn’t break even even if it charged users $25/month.
But .. not everything gets built to make money. Freeways are an example. They are considered enabling infrastructure. [...]

Harte-Hanks surveyed 1,000 companies and found that 71% of them want to monitor their web site for problems, but only 34% do. Also, 71% want tools to find the root of problem, but only 21% have them.
The survey was commissioned by Symphoniq, a provider of monitoring tools, who additionally note that more than 3/4 of [...]

…get new ones!
Compliance Pipeline reports on a new Forrester survey:
A whopping 63% of large companies employ or plan to hire people to read or audit sent e-mail — that figure is 70% among the largest companies.
This is just offensive. Check out The GNU Privacy Guard.