“Click” by Bill Tancer

What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

I’m not really qualified to write a book review on “Click” by Bill Tancer.

Especially considering I’m not particularly knowledgeable on the topic of human behaviour (well, like everyone else I’ve read Malcolm Gladwells books of course) and also considering that “Click” was so easy to read and hard to put down I chewed through it in a matter of days – and that was several weeks ago.

So, despite the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m not familiar with the text I can say that “Click” was fascinating, entertaining and very easy to read. I give it an 8/10.

Web analysis is of course about human behaviour, but the surprising thing is what analysts can do with the mountains of very current data at their disposal. Not only can you drill down into the human psyche and understand what outside factors have affected online behaviour, but you can predict the future as well!

Most interesting to me was the analysis that the author went into regarding the success of social networks and extracting from that analysis how social networks work basically. It was a real insight for me as to how users interact with Web 2.0, which is very valuable from a marketing perspective especially.

What I couldn’t understand was how the author was able to create such detailed personas for groups of users. It was clear where hitwise gathers their data from mostly, but I didn’t understand how that data could induce so much detail about a user’s socio economic status for instance. I’m not sure how much of that information was gathered explicitly or implicitly inferred.

I would highly recommend this book though for anyone that works on the web space today. As the landscape changes on the internet with the latest point oh addition it was very interesting to see how users are interacting with the changing technology and what factors are affecting those interactions.

Profile:  Frank has been programming for the web using PHP, Javascript and numerous libraries and frameworks for the past 5 years. More articles.