Tesco to offer API to developers

Amazing news –  Tesco have decided to offer it’s online shopping API to developers to develop what they will with their database and their product inventory. In a very forward thinking, future-gazing move the supermarket giant are embracing Web 2.0 and opening up it’s doors to allow it’s data to be used elsewhere around the web as third parties see fit. Interestingly a few months ago now The Guardian also unveiled an API which they called Open Platform. Back then there was equal bemusement as to the use that such an API could be put, and the same can be said of today’s announcement. There will also inevitably be a lot of small print to read! Of course the whole notion of the API sits firmly within the Open Source movement, and came into the spotlight when Twitter launched, as a minute offering, with an API to allow developers to do anything they wanted to with the data. Indeed this is how Twitter rose to stardom – it’s not the geeky nature of being able to share every engrossing detail of your day, but the ability to chop up and present that data in as many ways as anyone might like to. So for Tesco – well I guess a whole load widgets might come out of this. They do sell more than just groceries these days… can anyone else come up with anything off the cuff? What is the most useful thing you could do with Tesco’s database? There’s a bunch of bananas in it for the best idea!...

Google Ad Planner and stories from numbers

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, always says your homepage is not a golden door through which all your visitors will pass. And he’s right. Search engines have flipped the funnel. Every page that drives traffic is a landing page. But just because Google ignores your homepage doesn’t mean you can’t optimize the performance of your lower level pages. In his latest post Avinash talks about media planning and display marketing from a stories and numbers point of view. In “Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian & Telling Stories With Data” Avinash demonstrates how the free tools that are available today, such as Google Insights for Search, and Adplanner, provide a great (free) way to help much more accurately target your media, and in turn save you a lot of money. This is particularly so when compared to offline or traditional media. Avinash also gives some interesting insights into how and where Google gets it’s data: Ad Planner [does not use] Google Analytics data globally. It has an option where you can opt in your GA data if you want (but you have to go through a minorly painful process to do it – and only you as a site owner can do that). I am going to go out on a limb and say that 99.9999% of the sites in the Ad Planner don’t have GA implemented on their sites. It is not hard for you to check. Search for cnn.com in the Ad Planner or hp.com or your mom’s / friend’s site. You’ll see data. But if you use WASP or do a quick View Source you’ll see none of them actually use GA. If you want to learn where the Ad Planner gets its data here is the faq: http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=15016 Google Ad Planner is surely a revolutionary free tool, but as Avinash hints, it’s the ay the data is interrogated and used that counts. Here at ThinkSearch our analytics experts have many years experience seeing ‘The Matrix’ in data strands. Talk to us about how we can help you utilise these free cutting edge tools to your great...