"if it's something my tailor does, why is it such a big deal for my site?"

Measurement is one of those things that everyone thinks they know and do, but few people actually seem to understand or succeed at.

I once sat in a room with a really smart client who actually said, "I can measure my TV ads in GRPs. I don't see any way I can measure any of this digital stuff."

Everyone's jaws dropped. We'd just spent an hour taking him through his brand's digital ecosystem, thinking he at least got the basics. After hearing that we quickly went back to square one. Again.

It's appalling to me that today every organization doesn't know exactly what users on their sites and other digital properties are doing. It's imperative from a response point of view. You have to know what helps, what hurts, and what's extraneous – in order to gain any efficiencies, and in order to get better against the competition. It's a basic of how smart people do their business well, from Lester Wunderman to the 37 Signals guys, in DM and in building digital apps. Know the data, test, learn from the new data, test again, learn again. And technically, you build everything from your tracking needs outward.

If your number one priority isn't wanting to know exactly what your consumer is doing when they engage with you, I suspect you're not going to last long in the business of this century.