Very true. My thought process for this has been "trust, but verify". Trust your gut, give it a try, and then see if the data confirms your gut reaction. I spec

Very true. My thought process for this has been "trust, but verify". Trust your gut, give it a try, and then see if the data confirms your gut reaction. I specialize in marketing, and frequently I have to commit large sums of money to media buys without any hard data about whether the traffic will convert or not(beyond basic, vague demographic info). I have to make a gut decision about the quality of traffic coming from a particular site/campaign, and then wait for conversion data to come in before finding out if I was right. I found that as I gained more experience doing this, and my unconscious absorbed more and more data from past campaigns, I got a lot better at those gut decisions. Now, most of the time, I can look at any site or traffic source and estimate somewhat accurately how valuable that traffic is and make a quick gut decision about whether it's worth investing in. In the absence of hard data, being able to make these quick gut decisions is invaluable.