[joshhepworth]

I think you're getting at a very interesting conflict here that the author of the article attempted to explain. While user metrics can gauge the success of a web startup, that's often all they can do. Those metrics will (potentially) tell the company if they're improving or declining, and if they should be taking action.

However, it will not tell the company what actions to take. They're nowhere near as useful as a targeted, action specific metric in determining what to do. If my website's # of visitors drops 50% over a week, there might be something wrong, but I don't know what action to take without more information. Figuring out what engages users on the site and what keeps them coming back and measuring those things would be way more useful than simply knowing how many users are visiting.

[far33d]

If you track traffic sources with high granularity and get lots of traffic from ads or viral channels, you can get actionable data from traffic metrics.

Overall I agree - actionable metrics are the most important. I just take issue with the idea that only revenue related metrics are important.