Web2.0 (or cloud computing) opens a brave new world for website applications and products, and brings a lot of challenges for China’s web analytics as well. In this article, I want to briefly introduce how Chinese vendors help users to overcome challenge and meet their business requirement (although not perfectly meet).
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Taobao sellers’ tracking puzzle
Taobao.com is an extremely popular C2C e-commerce platform in China, just like eBay in the States. Analysis International data says that more than 3 million sellers and 180 million buyers are bargining and dealing every day. One day, one of my friends who owns a Taobao shop asked me a question. He wanted to use Google Analytics to track his shop’s performance.
"Ohh… it seems not possible" is my first reaction.
But the requirement is there. Sellers want to know a lot of things about their shops, e.g. traffic volume, traffic quality, traffic source quality, promotion performance and conversion. They even wanna know what kind of page design and content is more powerful to attract prospects and persuade them to purchase. Some of them are even more "greedy", they want to know their competitors’ performance. But, disappointingly, Google Analytics seems not a solution for us common users. We can’t utilize Google Analytics directly because Taobao is a ASP (Application Service Provider) website, a web2.0 site, where JavaScript tracking codes not allowed. How could my friend do? Some smart Chinese practitioners gave out some solutions: continue reading…