Mass metrics are pointless
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
evhead makes some good points about how pageviews are going the way of hits in the grand game of website analytics:
Pageviews were never a great measure of popularity…
So what’s a better measurement? Good question. Like many good questions, the answer is “it depends.” If you’re talking about what’s important to pay attention to on your own site, you have to determine what your primary success criteria are and measure that as best you can. For some sites, that could be subscribers, or paying users, or revenue, or widgets deployed, or files uploaded, or what have you. It may even be pageviews.
At Blogger, we determined that our most critical metric was number of posts. An increase in posts meant that people were not just creating blogs, but updating them, and more posts would drive more readership, which would drive more users, which would drive more posts.
Essentially it depends on your site and your intentions. A search site has very different measures of success to a site such as MySpace or Flickr or a web-app like Megite.
evhead goes on to say that someone should tackle the tough job of providing a single metric culled from various data. I doubt one metric can be found and doubt it is even worth it. The measure of success between different vertical markets is too great for one metric to be anything more than vainglory. It is largely worthless knowing that MySpace is on the march to beating Yahoo! in pageviews/traffic/something. Two different sites.
Looking above you can see my latest Google Analytics report. It is pretty and has some interesting data points but the interest is the same as a funny video on YouTube. Interesting but useless.
Google Anlytics isn’t useless. For many sites it is a power tool but in my case and the case of many personal bloggers it is pretty pictures and nothing more. My measure of success is connections with readers. Readers who email me, readers who comment and readers who mention my posts in theirs. Not pageviews or sources, not search keywords or length of time spent.
A metric per vertical market would be useful, for advertisers and investors and even us users, but one, grand, over-engineered metric isn’t worth our time.
