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@cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev @xgranade@wandering.shop ah, right, I can't believe I totally forgot about clickthrus. Well, it's not like cross site tracking isn't a thing, so that probably gives them ... I'm going to use the term "confidence", but I don't mean true confidence, as in, actual confidence that this is the truth. I wouldn't be surprised if they were abusing statistical terms for sales.

As in, they probably have a statistical measure of confidence which itself may or may not be high (IE, this many clickthroughs correlated with this many sales, here's the 95% CI), but the degree to which that is actually correlated with reality.... mmmmm. How do I put it? If this was the case, I don't think there's a good reason to accept that quantification as being necessarily realistic or representative of whatever the "true" impact is. That is, I think it's an easy number to calculate and report and it looks good in sales pitches and slide decks from marketing. But it's still highly context sensitive: if I ran the only goddamn lemonade stand in the world and everyone had a disease that only lemonade could cure, I could spend an assload or no money on marketing and it wouldn't really make a difference, but if I did spend money they could certainly give me a number that made it look well spent.