When you are working on your business you will be making a lot of decisions. Some of those decisions will have a bigger impact than others, but how you arrive at those decisions can influence the outcome, sometimes for years to come.

A lot of the business owners I work with are what I like to call “shoot from the hip” types. They go on gut-instinct, intuition, experience, and quite often, emotion. I am not like that, in fact I am quite analytical (to the point of analysis paralysis) so I figure their guts must tell them despite the mismatch in styles, it is still OK to work with me!

Despite my fondness for facts, logic and data, I can’t argue with their results. It seems whatever they have going on is working with them.

Even so, I think more people should take some quality time with their numbers. The problem comes for spontaneous types when their intuition can’t or won’t tell them which way to go. There is a point where purely instinctive managers need some information to go on.

In the online marketing world we are flooded with data points and metrics, both from site analytics and email tracking results. You can think of these metrics as knobs on a big control board. The trick is knowing which to tweak, and when.

For example, you know sales are low. The first instinct of many marketers is to turn up the traffic dial to 11. That can help, but is the increase in traffic covering up a larger, more serious underlying problem in conversions?

Of course a lot of untargeted traffic is going to do you no good at all. A lot of people mistake a Digg front page driving 20,000 visitors to be a huge ecommerce success, but in fact the real value of going popular in social media is often the links you get and exposure. Social media traffic converts poorly when compared to search engine, email or referrals.

At the other end of the scale are people trying to tweak conversions when they have not got enough traffic to know if the “improvements” they are making are real or an illusion. If you only get 100 visits to a page then each sale is a 1% increase in conversions – too easy to be mislead. You need to know your numbers are statistically relevant.

One way to tell where your problem lies is your “bounce rate” – how many people stick around once they land on your page.

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