ClickZ: Get Real About Faux Precision in Web Analytics

Dave Morgan writes in ClickZ that promoting online marketing as being precisely measurable frequently does it a disservice. He shows the silliness of many such claims with the example, "we had 2.47 unique visitors per second last month on the Breaking News section in the 10-11 a.m. weekday daypart, up from 1.675 average uniques in the same month the year before." Aside from including false precision (2.47 instead of 2.5), the methods for determining unique visitors aren't accurate enough for this sort of comparison anyway, due to log file discrepancies and multiple visits from one unique being counted as separate unique visits. Morgan worries that the attempt to make such statements will backfire when client marketers savvy to the fact that much of it is mumbo jumbo.