I have a long held belief that if you really care about results, you have to measure them somehow. The corollary to that is that everyone tends to focus on the things you measure, often to the detriment of other things that are important as well.

I think most people also find measuring results valuable, which has sparked the move to 'dashboards' over the past few years to supplement the many reports most businesses have. Dashboards (or a few graphs in a report) make it easier to spot trends - easy to just glance rather than look at a daily view and not catch meaningful changes. The trick, if you can call it one, is to make sure that you also get enough of a view of the influencing factors.

For example, I'm working on a web project that requires users to do the typical registration process to validate their email address. If you just look at the numbers of users added daily the number is exciting, but is that really the whole picture? We also track how many registered but didn't confirm (typo in email, changed mind, etc), and for the larger view, we're constantly deactivating members that have an email address which no longer accepts mail. So while adding users is important, the more important number is to look at the overall growth which is somewhat shallower. It feels like we have a better handle on what's real, but is it really better?

I think it is, but it can be over done (and under done!). Back in the days when the three of us ran SSC we looked at a whopping six measures a couple times a month; total members, newsletter subscriptions, page views, advertising revenue, and queued content. No daily report. Sometimes digging in to a specific area to look at results or trends, but that usually in response to a perceived problem or to check on the results of a change. Low budget? Absolutely! Hard to argue with the long term success, the piece you can't see is what the difference would have been with more formal measuring/reporting.

Going back to the numbers, think about why you're measuring and what you're doing to do with the information:

• Health indicator. Things like sales, registrations, that you expect to hit x level, warn you if that starts to change
• Change assessment. Any time you roll out a new product or service, tweak the way something works, you want to be able to see if the net change was positive or negative

I'll also add that there are intangibles that are hard to measure. I get minimal information about my blog here on SSC, mainly just the number of reads. Interesting to look to see which topics are popular and which aren't (though I write what I want to write, not what's popular!), but the real value of the blog is how it shapes your perspective of me. Does number of reads equal positive perception? Or number of feed subscribers? Even if you're blogging twice a month and getting 30 views on each post, those 30 views are shaping your image for better or worse. How the heck do you measure that?

More tomorrow!