What is it with exact numbers? In the business world, it is not uncommon to see executives from the highest managerial office to the lowliest analyst put an extraordinary premium on receiving exact numbers in all manner of business correspondence and presentation. Of course, exact numbers have their place in this world, in accounting general ledgers and certain scientific research, for example, however, most business analyses can convey desired messages and appropriate conclusions with best-effort calculations.

The web analytics community has been shaken by the release of a Comscore report indicating that web audience cookie deletion leds to an average overcount by a factor of 2.5x in unique visitors. Its wonderful to have solid research on the extent of cookie deletion, but this information is not exactly news to the internet marketing community, but rather the quantification of a rather poorly-kept secret about web analytics. For years, vendors and users alike have known that cookies are an imperfect mechanism for measuring unique users. Unless you are tracking unique visitors with a site login and unique customer ID, you are left with a variety of unsatisfactory methods, from IP addresses, web beacons, 1st party cookies, 3rd party cookies, and probably a few other techniques. All will lead to some degree of under or over-counting and are guaranteed to frustrate anyone daring to seek the holy grail of perfect reporting.

It is all so dire for us marketers? Of course, it is important to have an idea of how much the audience sizes for your particular websites are overstated, in order to adjust figures where an absolute number is desirable such as calculating reach for advertising and content licensing arrangements. However, for most purposes, a good, hard look at the trend will suffice. In business, an accurate trend reading generally counts for more than a precise number.

If you’re still doubting the faithfulness of your analytics package and want a second opinion, you can always consider external traffic measurements from providers like Alexa, Hitwise, and comScore (yep, the same guys who gave you second thoughts about your analytics solution in the first place). Be warned: you won’t find exact numbers from these companies either, but rather just additional ways of measuring your audience.

Will this obsession for the exact, this passion for precise, ever go away? Its doubtful. As the fellows over at Juice Analytics mentioned in an enlightening posting called “Too Literal with Numbers” sometime ago:

People who have experience and comfort with numbers have the ability to abstract meaning from analysis for themselves–even when numbers don’t line up, the data is unclear, or the analysis has minor flaws. They can ask themselves higher-level questions: What does this mean? What are the implications for the business? How else could these results be interpreted?

In contrast, people who are uncomfortable with analytics treat numbers literally. They are disturbed by surface level inconsistencies. They expect–even need–the numbers to line up in straightforward ways. The medium simply isn’t familiar enough to abstract their own meaning.