Yes, too much data can make you go blind and data doesn’t equal instant wisdom, but it’s better than nothing/guessing and it opens the door to at least combining the wonderful intuition of entrepreneurs and data driven design.

To potentially further brighten (or cloud) our insights, Google has added not one extra dimension but two. Yes, that’s right, five dimensional data analysis. How? Not in a boring Pivot-Table kind of way, but in an exciting visual way that may lead to a lot of “I don’t care, it looks fantastic” comments from marketing managers looking for fodder to distract the boss from their otherwise mediocre numbers.

So what is it?

It’s a normal X (one dimension) and Y (two dimensions), combined with colours (three dimensions), size (four dimensions) and finally time (five dimensions). The time works by the aid of a play button causing the other dimensions to dance about and provide the eye candy.

Here is a quick example from this very website where you can see the following dimensions;

1. Keywords entered into Google search that ended up at Pollenizer.com.
2. Number of visits
3. Pages per visit (repeated, yep)
4. Average time on site.
5. How all these stats changed over a month

It’s pretty amazing to see, but like all data and stats, it needs the right application and careful analysis to turn it into useful knowledge that you can act on.