News in the Channel’s resident analyst, Wickus Bester, looks at a metric that scores a product on Stock in the Channel on how popular it is and what the data means over time – and when it comes to the Stockies Awards.
The channel reflects itself in the data it generates. With the ocean of data growing by the day, it is important for companies to leverage insight driven by data to understand the market and where they fit into it. Let’s consider a single product in the channel – how would you define its success, and track its progress as it matures? What reflection does a product leave in the data?
At Stock in the Channel, our BI engine provides a metric that scores a product based on how popular it is at that moment. Called the trending score, we analyse the searches made on our website and assign each product that appears in the top 100 searches per month with this reference score.
Application in the market – Search behaviour
Let’s say that we are interested in the trending processors over the past year. Below we can see two products’ search behaviour during periods where each reached the coveted #1 spot on the trending list respectively.
Using the trending score, we were able to focus our attention on which products helped drive the sales of processors between August and December last year.
Top trender
An honourable mention in this category is the following AMD offering for reaching the #1 spot in only two months since its launch in February.
This product of course forms a part of the larger ecosystem of product families, and looking at how the market stands now, the top 10 processors in the past month in terms of their trending score are from these series:
Tracking market changes
Although the trending score is based on searches, we can’t solely rely on the gross amount of search hits to determine the success of a product. When we look at the trend life cycle of a product, we also analyse the competitiveness of the product in terms of its trending behaviour. Can the product hold its own at the top, or was it a fleeting fad? How much of the market potential did it fill compared to other products?
Some products dominate the trending list, such as the products on the right which are among the few that have been in the overall top 100 for the past 12 months.
The future
In summary, the trending score is useful to identify popular products in the channel and is one of the metrics that Stock and the Channel will be using at the Stockies Awards later this year to recognise the cream of the channel’s crop. By promoting your products and thus improving their trending score, you can increase their chances of being recognised for their excellence in the industry at this new awards ceremony.
The majority of products, however, are in flux. For example, in the past year we will rank 6S6S8EA#ABU above 439Z5EA#ABU even though the latter has nearly double its number of searches. This is since the former could hold a streak for three months longer in its shorter lifespan than the older latter product.
