Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
The current crop of startup measurementtools is, sadly, focused on the traffic elements as well –Quantcast, Compete, Alexa, it’s all about measuring how many peopleyou have coming to your site. There are a thousand of other startupsout there trying to do measurements at a deeper level, but they allstart with this totally useless stat. I don’t envy these analyticscompanies – they must spend hundreds of thousands of man hoursgetting the numbers right, but at the end of the day, they don’tprovide any core value to the business.
Why am I so down on traffic as astatistic? Let me ask a follow up question: who’s in the lead? The50 person company with 10 M UV or the 2 person company with 50k UV?Did I mention the 2 person company has 45k paying customers, and the10 M UV company has 1k? You might as well ask who’s a bettercompany, the people who use Comic Sans for their default font, or thepeople who have offices in brick buildings. The problem that’s notobvious in the first sentence, that’s totally obvious in the secondis that you’re measuring the wrong thing, and even worse it’s anincredible distraction.
What’s the alternative? You’ve got towork backwards – rather than focusing on where the action is –keep your eye on your business. What will keep your company going foranother month, what is it going to take to expand, where are youweakest, what do you need to focus your team on? Traffic will go upand down – and paying attention to it at all will just distract youfrom what really matters. It may not be sexy to study your salespipeline, or your product schedule, but it’s the health of thebusiness.
