Numbers don’t move (or lie)

One of the things we have observed that is simultaneously frustrating and comforting about consumer Internet businesses, is that it is very hard to move the numbers once they are “pegged”. What we’re talking about is the amazing consistency you see between unrelated tests for certain types of actions. Of course, this is how rules-of-thumb are derived, and surprisingly (at least to me) they tend to hold true over a sufficient sample size. I like to think of it as noisy data converging towards an asymptote.

Most recently, this phenomenon came to our attention thanks to an article Intuit VP Seth Greenberg Evaluates The Facebook Funnel At The ANA’s Annual Conference on AdExchanger.com. TurboTax has done a great job with their use of social media, and this presentation highlights the funnel.

What I found most interested was their “lift” in terms of conversion rates: 4x. This is squarely in the 2x-5x range we have been observing for our clients for over 2 years now.

Whether you call it friendcasting, earned media or good old word-of-mouth, the numbers don’t lie… or move.