Apples to Apples

by Chris Gratigny on October 27th, 2009

You’ve heard the saying, right? People say, “that’s apples to oranges”. When comparing things, you have to compare “apples to apples” to get a true comparison. I have noticed that it isn’t necessarily what you are comparing, but it is whether you are comparing like things. If you come to a conclusion or make a decision based on comparing “apples to oranges”, that will inherently be a bad decision. Comparing “apples to apples” will get you much farther.

Why compare apples to apples? Here’s 5 quick reasons:

It just makes sense. Why do anything else?
It’s easy, you go to the same place for all apples that you compare.
It works.
It’s simple.
It’s sustainable.

No matter what you are dealing with, it can be measured in some way. I want to use website stats as an example here. On a website, there are total visitors, unique visitors, and page views. Okay, I’ll define those so you don’t wonder:

Total visitors is the total number of people who visited, counting each time as a visit. This would be how many times you have had people over to your house.
Unique visitors is the total number of people who visited, counting each person. This would be how many friends you have had over to your house.
Page views would be how many times those people clicked. This would be how many rooms in your house those people visited.

When you are comparing apples to apples, you would never compare unique visitors to total visitors. That doesn’t work. People will often throw out numbers, I have 1,000,000 visits on my site a month. Oh, you do? Unique? Total? Page views? You have to know what is being compared.

There are many instances in life where comparing the same thing to the same thing will get you farther than detailed analysis where you are comparing different things. When looking at numbers, be sure that you are comparing apples to apples to get a correct comparison.