Do you happen to know anyone who has tried this?

As I believe Jeff Bezos once said, Amazon's greatest asset is it's database. As the provider of an application, your greatest asset may be having multiple databases, one for each customer, with all databases structured identically.

Once you do the hard work for one customer, the prize will be a database that has been restructured many times, with additional database tables of derived data. With data that's just right you can run the statistics and show the results.

The payoff will be that all customers will have the new database, so the usual need for a custom job and expensive prep work will be gone. Each customer will only need to let their account run and their database fill, and the built in statistics formula will present some wonderful attribution reports.

The results may be surprising. Rigorous analysis may reveal that if the first click goes to a specific ad, the person is 20% less likely to buy. Pausing that ad may boost sales by 5%.

I'm skeptical of CRM – Conference Room Marketing. Things don't need to make sense when presented to the group. Ideas that are clear and quickly accepted may actually hurt the business. Ideas that everyone rejects as nonsense and flat out wrong may actually work quite well.

I like This Old House because in this complex world it is relaxing and comforting to watch skilled people succeed in an environment where reasonably simple rules, like measure once and cut twice, will do the trick.

My job involves imponderables, complexities beyond my comprehension. When the spreadsheets go up for the senior execs, I sit quietly, waiting to talk with the consultant at lunch, where we will talk shop and reveal how little we really know, where we will talk about what the spreadsheets don't contain, where we will acknowledge that our different approaches are often mere personal preferences and not the solid conclusions the black and white numbers on the spreadsheets make them out to be.

Months of work often results in incremental improvements. While glancing at a few customer records occasionally yields insights and it's fun to offer up a guess, I am skeptical, since this approach often produces results that give new meaning to your final statement – there are no right answers. When the data is so complex, how can it be otherwise?