Faith + Reason = Truth

Amidst the flurry of online metric news over the past couple of days, I would simply like to stand and applaud. This blog isn't an income source, yet I still give thought to increasing my readership, writing about topics that I believe other people might find interesting, and doing my utmost to avoid wasting people's time. If this were a revenue-generating venture, I'd REALLY be freaking out over metrics to an exponentially larger extent than I already do.

In the beginning, I looked at visits to the site, which was followed about 5 seconds later by switching to caring about unique visitors to the site, both of which were easily and cheaply accomplished with Google AdWords. However, while the 1st night of AdWords generated a vast number of purchased visits, an effortless drilling into the data revealed that a stunning percentage of them came from the myspace.com domain, and about 80-90% of them left after spending less than 5 seconds and clicking on no other pages or outgoing links at the site. Lesson learned on Night 1: visits and unique visitors are utterly meaningless if trying to effectively advertise on a site, because most of the visits could be nothing more than click-throughs that instantaneously click right back out.

Next, I started paying more attention to subscriber stats. Even these, however, can be meaningless, as demonstrated by my own subscriptions to other feeds.  There are many of which I simply glance at headlines from my Netvibes page (is "portal" still a word?), and there are some of which I visit their actual site and see actual ads if there are any. So sub counts can also be pretty misleading.

What I find most useful at my own blog as gauges of my writing effectiveness and interest level to readers are 2 things and 2 things only: time spent per visit and pageviews per visit.  When all visitors to the site spend, on average, 2 minutes or more per visit, and when pageviews per visit are 2.5-3.5 for all visitors on average, I feel good. People have bothered to read for a solid 2 minutes, and that's a long time! Better yet, they have been motivated enough to actually sample another offering or 2! If the metrics dip below those threshholds, I'll consider the subject of the post, how much effort I put in, etc., to see what went wrong.

My apologies for the mundane details I have subjected you to here, but I'm just psyched that companies will finally be focusing on more meaningful metrics. This, in turn, will hopefully lead to more interesting fare for our online consumption, as opposed to being sucked in by effective headline writers and then retreating to another site as quickly as possible (too late though - they've already logged you as a hit and can now charge higher ad rates or be sold for more millions). Under the current rules, I would think that audience-grabbing headline writing skills would be valued above all else, since visitor counts are all the ad rates are based on at this time. While valuable, it's plainly not (or should not be) the only thing that matters.