Like everybody else, I like "pretty" targets. You know, you're shooting off sandbags at 25 yards and you pull off a five-shot one-ragged-hole group while the rest are 2" or so.
The target is showed off, revered, and the gun granted mythical status. Much the same happens when firing off-hand. These are the targets that get posted.
To me these occasional targets matter little, even if they are honest. If you shoot enough they are going to happen. There's days when it seems you can't miss, just as there are those days when you feel you can't hit the proverbial Buick.
Nobody is 100%. If you are then your target's too big or the range too close and you are accomplishing nothing.
We all pull one occasionally for whatever reason. I prefer to track aggregate accuracy. Pick a range, pick a target size. Score your hits as a percentage. Keep a running average. After a few thousand rounds you'll have a pretty good idea how consistent you are. You can also tell if you're making real progress.
When you get well into the 90% hit rate, reduce the size of the target or increase the range.
We (me and others) came up with this as a method to compare a group of shooters. We started comparing each other and each range trip there was always a different winner, we were all pretty close in skill. It was hard to tell who was better. We were wondering more out of curiosity than competition.
There's some advantages. It doesn't matter how many rounds you fire at a target, so you don't have to change them that often. You can configure your target however you like just as long as there's a ring of the standardized size. If you have shooters shooting at different distances due to range restrictions you can even compensate for the different distances. For example 6" / 25 (yards) = 0.24 * 15 (yards) = 3.6" @ 15 yards. If you re-size your targets the same you'll even have the same sight picture.
It also gives you a good way of comparing one gun to another. For example, over 2,000 rounds I've shot my High Standard only slightly better than my S&W 22a, which was a bit of a surprise.
From what I read on the internet I'm not a very good shot. But somehow I'm better than most at the range. Go figure.