Good Analytics Won't Help If Your Data Sucks

At best, sophisticated analytics software can deliver good answers if the underlying data is accurate and-most critically-is the right data. For a lot of merchants, that is often not the case.

Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of payment facilitator BlueSnap, is proposing what he sees as a better way, at least for extracting useful answers from payments data. From his perspective, there are two big mistakes that merchants tend to do. First, they give far too much weight to pageviews and site visits from a region, assuming that a lot of activity translates into a lot of sales. And secondly, when those merchants do wisely opt to isolate sales from a region, they neglect to go back and adjust those figures to account for refunds and chargebacks.