Superstition, OCD or good analytics?
The AP is carrying an article about sports fans and their superstitions.
“It didn’t take Heather Pate long to figure out why her beloved Auburn University football team had begun losing. It was the pink toothbrush.
Pate, a lifelong fan of the school, has long refused to own anything with even a hint of red, the color of archrival Alabama. That puts her among the one in five sports fans who say they do things in an attempt to bring good luck to their favorite team or avoid jinxing them, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.”
One thing about folks who have hard-core superstitions is their devotion to the superstitions. People usually don’t say from the beginning “the Ducks won’t lose as long as I wear my Yell-O shirt every game-day.” It takes someone being very observant to the fact that for four weeks they wore the same T-shirt on days the Ducks won. Then, the one day they wore a different shirt the Ducks lost, but when wearing the original shirt on two more game-days resulted in Duck wins.
Wearing the same shirt every Saturday may seem a little obsessive compulsive to some people, but noticing the trends between a change in shirt and a team losing is just solid analytics.
There are all sorts of analytics programs available for tracking visitors and their actions on websites. Just collecting the data isn’t enough, though. These programs don’t do any good if you don’t have someone looking at the trends to match up changes in usage with what the causes may have been. This often can take a fair amount of detective work to figure out.
Many times companies have designers changing graphics on the front-end, user interface folks moving links and buttons around on a page, while programmers and system admins are making updates to code and servers on the back-end all at the same time. Nailing down the item that most effected the trends can take someone who’s able to really drill down and figure out what had the catalyst was.
I always find the best place to start is matching your T-shirts with the trends your seeing. I’ll let you know if that continues to work after the USC-UO game this weekend.
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