Measures of success

In order to measure the forward progress of this project, especially the success of specific initiatives, I first need to know what metrics I should be watching to guage that progress. Every business has different KPI's, and it often take time to uncover the key metrics. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins argues that a company needs to understand what drives their economic engine and then to focus all of their energies on optimizing that engine. In the same vain, developers of online applications must understand the metrics that most directly correlate to the "success" of their application, and focus their energies on optimizing those metrics. It isn't generally easy to determine what those metrics are, especially at the start of the project, and those metrics often change early in the lifecycle, but if you get this right (or even come close), you give yourself a tremendous advantage. Some can argue that only the companies that truly understand this will survive in an age where this data is so freely available. Online application develoers are lucky to have a bevy of online tools that provide amazing insight into the changing behaviors of visitors, in real time, and allow us to know more about the behaviors of our users than any business in the past has ever had (except for maybe the NSA).

At this point in the lifecycle of the site, I've determined that the following six metrics are the key data points I need to watch to track the progress of the site:

1. Visits/week
2. Bounce rate/week
3. PageRank
4. Linkbacks
5. Number of pages indexed
6. Delicious bookmarks

Taking a queue from the Planet Money podcast, I will attempt to post a weekly update of these metrics starting with this week (below). Note a few things here:

1. There is a lot more to this then simply number of hits to the site.
2. At this point in the lifecycle, PageRank is key. As I don't expect the PageRank to change much during the week, I'll be watching linkbacks (which should correlate, eventually).
3. I expect this list to change as the site becomes more popular and the traffic patterns change.
4. Bounce rate is going to be critical, especially if a future revenue source is based on the results page.
5. I'm leaving out "social media metions", such as twittering of the site, for now. I don't think that's a key metric at this point.

On to the current health of the site...


Visits/week
1,352

Bounce rate/week
33.31%

PageRank
0

Linkbacks
20

Number of pages indexed
218

Delicious bookmarks
97