An analytics product such as Chartbeat produces reams of data: pageviews, unique users, and more. News organizations reliant on advertising or user subscriptions must pay attention to these numbers because they’re tied to revenue — but it’s less clear how they might be relevant editorially.
Consider pageviews. That single number is a combination of many causes and effects: promotional success, headline clickability, viral spread, audience demand for the information, and finally, the number of people who might be slightly better informed after viewing a story. Each of these components might be used to make better editorial choices — such as increasing promotion of an important story, choosing what to report on next, or evaluating whether a story really changed anything. But it can be hard to disentangle the factors. The number of times a story is viewed is a complex, mixed signal.
It’s also possible to try to get at impact through “engagement” metrics, perhaps derived from social media data such as the number of times a story is shared. Josh Stearns has a good summary of recent reports on measuring engagement. But though it’s certainly related, engagement isn’t the same as impact. Again, the question comes down to: Why would we want to see this number increase? What would it say about the ultimate effects of your journalism on the world?
From here.
Measuring metrics always feels like the enemy to me, personally. By which I mean, I hate that it’s not enough for something to be “good,” but that it has to be “sticky” as well; I really hate that, for so many sites, generating pageviews would be preferable to being of high quality if it came to some kind of DeathBowl-esque showdown. The Game is The Game, etc.