[acdha]

Depends on standard - within the clued-in performance community, yes, but there are major, major companies still pushing averages and that causes a lot of people, particularly those without much stats / engineering background, to expect it everywhere.

To use one example which is prevalent throughout marketing, advertising, etc. Google Analytics reports only averages – this makes the results unreliable enough that I'm now advising people to simply pretend that field does not exist as it's completely untrustworthy. Awhile back I blogged about an example where 3 samples out of 200K threw the average off by a full order of magnitude: http://chris.improbable.org/2012/05/18/google-analytics-dece...

[Jabbles]

Very interesting, thank you. I especially like the replies from the Google analytics team, 8 months apart, that both acknowledge the issue and say they'll fix it...

[acdha]

Also that in addition to not having fixed it, accurate stats are apparently less of a priority than, say, a gigantic fixed-position toolbar. That's been disappointing…