10/90 Rule Essay

The 10/90 rule is a very important idea that can guide how organizations should utilize web analytics in their normal operations. Developed by Avinash Kaushik, it states that whatever a business is spending for the tools and vendor services, it should be spending nine times as much in people and staff to use, discover, and interpret the analytics tools and services. In many respects, this idea is contrary to how many large organizations view their resources, since more often than not putting far more money into tools than the people using those tools. For organizations large and small, this is a great rule of thumb to understand and steer an organization’s use of analytics as it works to improve both how well it understands its marketing and customer base AND how well it uses its marketing budget. Ideally, those goals should go hand in hand, as the better the business understands its customers and how well its products appeal to them, the better it can use everything, but especially its funds, to

The tools, no matter the cost, expensive or not, are only nearly as valuable as the people using and manipulating them. This is because any tool can generate tremendous amounts of data, reports, etc. However, what is harder to develop is the right expertise and training first to understand what the data and reports are saying, and probably even more importantly, what they are NOT saying. Additionally, even the data and reports that is generated is worthless if considered in exclusion to all the other data that is available to the company: press releases, management changes, world news, etc. “Investments in analytics can be useless, even harmful unless employees can incorporate that data into complex decision making