What do these three quotes have in common?

• “Worship no false idols” — The First Commandment in the Old Testament
• “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” — Zen adage
• “Become a ruthless killing machine when it comes to metrics/data” — Avinash Kaushik in a recent blog post.

If you guessed that they all warn (with increasing violence!) against mistaking the symbol of something for the real thing, congratulations! You won a pipe. Surrealist painter René Magritte painted this particular pipe as a way to get us thinking about the paradox of symbols. Under it he painted a caption, “This is not a pipe.”

To drive his point home, Magritte named the painting, The Treachery of Images.

So how can we know when it’s time to wage war against our own treacherous web analytics? And once the body count has been tallied, what takes their place? What do we use to answer key questions and spur appropriate actions?

Results Simply Summarized

The answer: Show your audience only what they really want to know — not mere numbers and measurements, but the other RSS: results simply summarized. Here’s Avinash’s post for the full story.

And here it is in a nutshell:

He describes a favorite application he downloaded for his Nexus One phone. It’s a cardio trainer. The app starts out just like another popular body monitoring system. I’m thinking of the Nike Plus application for the iPhone. Both give the standard run-down of miles run and progress achieved, compared with past sessions.

The cardio trainer app then makes an elegant attempt at RSS. Avinash, for one, feels that it succeeds. I agree. It refocuses attention past the numbers to the actual workout goal.

At the end of each run, to reflect his level of exertion, Avinash is presented with an award of sorts. The screen shows two pieces of fruit — two pairs. They represent the number of calories burned. The pairs are his to enjoy guilt-free. (Or he can imagine a calorie-laden equivalent, in a mental swap of one food for another. Perhaps the next version of the app will allow users to actually do this; To replace the outline of two pears with a rendering of a candy bar, or a couple of bottles of beer!)

You might think these simple pictures are the same as Magritte’s pipe — mere symbols; not the real thing. You’d be overlooking a major distinction.

All Magritte was doing was showing something. Avinash’s workout app was presenting it — awarding it. It was the summarization of the data behind it, proving to Avinash that this was his hard-won snack. It says, “Here you go. You earned it.”

Connecting On Two Levels

The representation of the pears became something he connects with — both rationally and emotionally. Unlike Magritte’s pipe, the pears are supported by evidence. Consequently they become so real he can taste them!

Sadly, if most analytics pros were asked to cut out their own distracting and unpersuasive metrics, they’d discover that little remains. Most metrics talk and talk but never get to the point.

This is precisely what senior management does not want. They want quick and truthful take-aways. Will they be dining one delicious pear this month, or two? Or will there be none at all?

Of course business leaders would pears in their analytics absurd. So what do they care about? They want to see money of course. Or at least, clear proxies for money. Showing people is always good. Consider using generic-looking silhouettes of them, shown judiciously and with data supporting their numbers.

Be bold, and show senior management that their site this month generated more sales leads — as represented by silhouettes of cookie-cutter executives, presumably eager to know more about the product. Count them. Are there more shown this month or last? Line them up for comparison.

Or show how the website is lowering operational costs, by successfully answering more consumer questions without calls to your pricey phone center. In this case, the graphic could be a string of telephone headset icons. Compared to last month, are there fewer of them shown, or more?

Go on your own metrics killing spree, but first, know what you’re pursuing. Kill any metric that produces more smoke than light. Allow the remaining metrics to build upon each other, and add richness to your story. Then, as a satisfying grace note, find the single graphic that best sums up the current situation. Use symbolic language that is meaningful to your audience, to transcend facts and figures.

Do this, and far from being Magritte’s pipe, this graphic will be your own “Avinash’s pears.”