Chiffon and on: Prom dress hunts serve as researcher’s informational signpost

An obsession with data and a fascination with the curious habits of prom dress shoppers has led Bill Tancer to the best-seller list.

Not bad for the first-time author of "Click." The subtitle explains the premise of the book that rests at No. 22 on the hardcover, nonfiction portion of The New York Times best-seller list: "What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters."

Tancer works with Web data all day at his regular gig as general manager of global research for Hitwise, a company with New York headquarters that provides competitive intelligence for Internet companies. He's good at finding hidden gems buried in the ocean of data collected daily from 10 million Internet users in the United States.

In the interest of full disclosure, Stephens Media, the parent company of the Review-Journal, is a Hitwise customer. I'm the person in Las Vegas who digs into data associated with reviewjournal.com and many other Web sites. I don't deal with Tancer in my work, but do interact regularly with our account manager, who encouraged me to read "Click."

Back to prom dresses. Tancer noticed an unlikely pattern for Web searches that included "prom dresses." It is the No. 1 search term during the first week of January several years running. "If most proms take place in mid-to-late May, why would the highest volume of searches for 'prom dresses' occur the first week of January?" he writes.

Tancer's analytical mind went to work, and he zeroed in on the role played by social networking sites like MySpace.com and looked at the rest of the prom-related media. He went so far as to create a MySpace profile for "Taylor," a mythical prom dress shopper.

The book details Tancer's prom dress search research, and gives a heads-up to retailers.

"Prior to the Internet, the prom dress shopping season was dictated by the retailer," Tancer writes. "Upcoming prom fashions would begin showing up in stores in late March at the earliest. With the advent of the Internet, prom fashion merchandise and information is available 24x7x365."

Tancer's belief that actions always speak louder than words is validated many times as he explores corners of the Web. The common Internet translation for the "PPC" acronym is "pay-per-click." Tancer shows us what users are doing in the "PPC" world of "porn, pills and casinos."

Don't worry for your privacy. The 10 million Web surfers he studies are looked at as a group; there is no way to track individual surfers. Data are provided by Internet Service Providers in aggregate and also from opt-in surveys.

"I'm constantly amazed about how repetitive our search patterns are year over year," Tancer said in a phone interview. "(The search term) 'diet' spikes on January 1 every year, and it lasts four days. Every year."

That prom dress has to fit.

Share your Internet story with me at agibes@reviewjournal.com.