📑 Metrics

Bookmarked metrics, thy name is vanity (jarche.com)

About a year ago I deleted Google Analytics from this website. I no longer know where visitors come from, what they find interesting, or what they click on. This has liberated my thinking and I believe has made my writing a bit better. I always wrote for myself but I would regularly peak at my statistics. Was my viewership going up? What did people read? How did they get there? What search terms were people using? — Who cares? There are a lot of numbers that ‘social media experts’ will tell you to maximize. But there are few that make any difference.

Harold Jarche reflects on turning Google Analytics off. He instead suggests that the metric that matters (for him) is how many books he sells and how many people sign upmto his courses. He gives the example of a course that had hundreds of likes and reposts, yet only one person signed up. This has me thinking about which metric matters to me and the way in which I engage with other people’s ideas and projects. This is particularly pertinent to my focus on intent.