How Many Albino Dwarves from Albania Viewed My Sight?
Analytics seem to once again be the catch word of all things internet driven. In the information age it seems the ability to produce numbers for the sake of producing numbers has become its own industry. Numerical quantification of behaviors on the web seem to be reaching new levels of stratification and to most degrees over analyzation. With these new micro-analytics comes the danger of over simplification of sales and business issues or the user simply looking too microscopically at a number.
There is no longer a macro school of thought when it comes to an individual business, market, or internet segment. Those people concerned with the basic elements of what their job are have become minutia fixated, often times ignoring basic sales, marketing, or economic principles because they have received some analytics report with segments or such broken down into such micro data that the brain starts fixating on a part of the whole and not the whole big picture.
Couple this selective data analysis with the inability to tie information to these numbers that isn't empirical and this becomes a path of decision making that leads to a reactionary decision making process. The farther down this path one goes, the more reactionary the decisions that have to be made since all information isn't taken into account. Inevitably; the focus on tiny bits of analytic data cause a myopic effect that can at times destroy a once viable business model.
There are multiple examples of latching on to a number. People who sell internet advertising are at evangelical forefront of the analytics huckster line. They tend to have a number that they cling to like Excaliber when contacting a business. Eventually the glistening sword's gleaming sheen blinds the customer and then a poor decision is made by the customer. After all; the advertiser could improve the market reach of the product amongst albino dwarfs in Albania.
