Last weekend we were at a college and ran our new test with 135 students. It included a standard quantitative test as well as something new that we had created. We have all the students a graph that contained 3 parameters – visits, page views and orders. The graph was for the full month of December and we asked students to come up with their conclusions. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of observations, considering none of them had heard about web analytics before we met with them.

What was even more interesting is how “the wisdom of crowd” proved true. I have been reading that book for the past few days and didn’t fully agree with the author on all points. But the results of this test was so correct. James Surowiecki would have been happy to see the results. No one student had come up with the best answer. But if I took a combination of all the answers, it would beat the answers of our best analysts.

The short listed students are going to take the test I had mentioned in my previous post. Will keep the results posted here. Meanwhile, if you have ideas / comments regarding this topic, please comment. Would appreciate your thoughts.

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