Understanding web analytics and statistics is becoming more important for web marketers. People who read this blog or work with us know that we are data driven. Our decisions are made after testing and analyzing. And we are not the only ones.

The New York Times as well as Wired ran interesting stories on Statistics and Data.  Google figured prominently in both articles.

The world is changing from analog to digital. Data is going to become more important to businesses as time goes on. I agree with Arthur Benjamin that statistics should be a required subject.

Replacing Calculus Education with Statistics and Probability

Maybe this will help the next generation of website analysts to be more successful.

One of the most challenging parts of my job is to convince people of the importance of AB, multivariate, and usability testing on their website. Initially, most companies want to focus on getting traffic through SEO and Google Adwords.

For new sites this is understandable–you can’t do AB testing on sites with no traffic.

However, websites with traffic should start multivariate testing immediately. It doesn’t interfere with increasing traffic through SEO or PPC. And it can improve conversions significantly.

Dan Ariely wishes his nurses would have been open to testing procedures.

It is somewhat comforting to know that Internet marketing is not the only area where people are reluctant to test. At the end of Dan Ariely’s fascinating talk about cheating, he tries to convince everyone of the importance of testing by concluding, “Unless we test those intuitions we won’t make things better.”