The Sucking Manifesto A book about numbers

It's an introduction by the authors Steve and Markus. They only wrote it the day before the launch, since they thought it was a bit pretentious to write introductions.

[Add person here] was kind enough to read our book and then crazy enough to write us a foreword. He's awesome. You should go buy some of his books too.

It seems like there are so many numbers out there for us to consume that we have started to treat them like bacteria - with paranoia. Why have we become this way? Have we painted ourselves into a proverbial corner and now we can't get out?

We suck. There's no argument about that, it's all about the magnitude of denial. In some drug or alcohol program they say that the first step towards healing is agreeing to having a problem. To help, we made you a list.

If you already know your way around analytics systems, you might find this chapter a bit tedious, but glance through it. A common language is the best weapon we have against ignorance.

Going deeper into the jargon hole, we have a list of values and ratios. We provide our way of calculating these and it will make reading the next chapters much more pleasant if you have these stored in your brain.

Like urban legends, there are thousands of false facts, creative truths and blasphemous lies out there about analytics and measuring. We start with five and will keep adding if you send them to us.

We tried to create a method, a model - a law, if you will, to help us constantly develop and make ourselves better. We call it our model. It's not perfect, but at least it's effective.

Your website goals and objectives should tie in very closely to your overall business strategy not be separated from it. We give you the what's what about goals and objectives.

Before we start working out our costs per acquisition, click calculations and formulas, let's take a moment and think of business basics. They should matter much more with analytics that you think.

Benchmarking is like asking for the other opinion. If you just have a single set of data, it's very difficult to know how you're doing. We show you how it can be done with existing data or by starting from scratch.

When it comes to marketing, we have tons of different life cycles we are dealing with, but often leave unnoticed or neglect to give them the value they deserve. Just like the seasons in the year, we people are moody beasts.

We have made calculating your costs per click and acquisition quite easy already, but how much value is each conversion really creating? Even more, where and how is it created? Can we improve it?

Phasing is something that is missedo often. Do you really want to send all of them at once? Should you send them in parts? Yes you should and we'll tell you why and how.

The ultimate test for agencies, what happens if you double their budget or half their budget. What will the result look like? Are the fixed costs the big thing? They can be.

There are a lot of costs involved in anything business-related. Since we're so afraid of numbers, we tend to stress about the big, fixed ones and totally not care about the tiny ones that come in a box of million.

Our model is not just a theory, so we wanted to give you an example of how we have used it in the past. The best thing about our model is that it scales perfectly. Whether you're a one man show or you have 50,000 employees, it will work.

We wrote a short story, an imaginary campaign and how our model can be used in smaller projects too. Analytics shouldn't be just a privilege for big corporations. It's time for the little guy to shine.

We gathered a long list of everyday applications for using our model. We hope it will give you or your colleagues something to think about, even helping you find the right way towards redemption.