Lies, Damn Lies and Analytics

For many of the same reasons statistics gets a bad rep, Analytics is even worse.

Let’s just look at two points here out of many:
1 – All traffic is not equal. Banner traffic can easily be 10 to 100 times less effective than organic search.
2 – Some sites get most of their traffic from organic search where others get over 100 times or more traffic from banner and paid search than organic.

Now take the first two points and try talking about what a good conversion rate is or what a good bounce rate is in general. The truth is unless you break down web analytics questiosn down and evaluate them on a per traffic source basis, then you are comparing apples to oranges.