On The Trail

Today, a little web analytics advice from Donald Rumsfeld:

The Unknown
As we know, 
There are known knowns. 
There are things we know we know. 
We also know 
There are known unknowns. 
That is to say 
We know there are some things 
We do not know. 
But there are also unknown unknowns, 
The ones we don’t know 
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing
(From Slate) 

That Donald sure had a way with words, and I think they apply pretty well to our little world. In web analytics it is important to be keenly aware of what you don’t know. Why? Because we use the data we have – the things we know- to make decisions. Every day we’re trying to optimize the things we’re measuring, but often what we’re measuring is just a proxy for actual success. Because there are things we don’t know, things our tools can’t tell us. For exmple, if you run a lead gen site you probably don’t know if the leads are actually converting. If you’re looking at a ecommerce site what is the return rate on the sales you’re measuring? Are they repeat or one-time buyers? 

There are tons of critical connections that most of us haven’t made yet. And if we don’t take that uncertainty into account we can make some really bone-headed recommendations. We can go to great effort and expense to optimize the part of the process we can see and measure, while our seccess gets lost in the critically important part of the process we can’t see. Luckily for us, all is not lost. These are things we know we don’t know, so we just have to remember that, and factor it into the decisions we make from the things we do know. 

One thing I know is that I haven’t posted here in almost exactly a year. The year has seen me move from a medium sized retail company to a medium sized unit of a giant company. I’ve also come to realize why there are so few WA blogs from practitioners — we can’t really write about work. Consultants can write obliquely about what they’re thinking about all day, but that doesn’t pay for those of us working on a single site. That said, I’m going to try to make the effort. Will the next post come sooner than next April? I hope so, but that is a known unknown.